While people were in a daze of reverie following the lunar eclipse and the Pope’s U.S. visit, a very important yet overlooked announcement was made by the Department of Justice.
“Launch of Strong Cities Network to Strengthen Community Resilience Against Violent Extremism”
rang the bell to usher in a global-local initiative to ferret out
extremism at the local level – yes, in the United States. Symbolically,
it could also signal a turning point when it comes to local authorities
and their treatment of the residents at large. Indeed, it is a global enmeshment that most Americans are either a) in the total dark about, or b) going hysterical over, if they’ve heard about it.
Honestly,
either of those reactions is understandable when you start digging into
the announcements and its sponsors only to find the typical convoluted,
global-psycho-babble that signals to the astute that they are about to
lose their rights and be perceived as domestic terrorists. But can
anyone really say for sure? Of course not. Not when the message is written in Newspeak gibberish.
What is the Strong Cities Network and why did some U.S. cities join up?
On
the face of it, SCN is to strengthen the bond between cities in the
U.S. and global cities in the fight against violent extremism,
internationally and at the local level. It will funnel help to local
authorities of those cities which hop on board.
Fresh
off the scene from those two epic embarrassments, the UN now wants to
tell governments of the world how to censor the internet. I wish I was
kidding.
From the Washington Post:
On
Thursday, the organization’s Broadband Commission for Digital
Development released a damning “world-wide wake-up call” on what it
calls “cyber VAWG,” or violence against women and girls. The report
concludes that online harassment is “a problem of pandemic proportion” —
which, nbd, we’ve all heard before. But the
United Nations then goes on to propose radical, proactive policy changes
for both governments and social networks, effectively projecting a
whole new vision for how the Internet could work.
Under
U.S. law — the law that, not coincidentally, governs most of the
world’s largest online platforms — intermediaries such as Twitter and
Facebook generally can’t be held responsible for what people do on them.
But the United Nations proposes both that social networks
proactively police every profile and post, and that government agencies
only “license” those who agree to do so.
People are being harassed online, and the solution is to censor everything and license speech? Remarkable.
Published time: December 13, 2013 09:35
Edited time: December 13, 2013 13:48
The Catalan regional parliament has set November next
year for a referendum on the Spanish province’s independence. The
government in Madrid blandly said the vote won’t happen, but activists
wonder how it might be stopped.
Catalonia’s four pro-independence parties, which hold a majority
in the regional parliament, announced Thursday that the rich
industrial Spanish province will hold a referendum on whether to
gain greater autonomy or even total independence from the
country’s central government.
The vote’s preliminary date is November 9, Catalan regional
government head Artur Mas said. The people will be asked two
questions: "Do you want Catalonia to be a state?" and "Do you
want that state to be independent?"
The former question was added for those Catalans who seek to
change Spain into a federation, with Catalonia forming part of
it. According to a Metroscopia poll in newspaper El Pais last
month, 46 percent of Catalans favor separatism versus 42 percent
who wish to remain within Spain. The support for greater
autonomy, however, is very strong.
Just minutes after the announcement Spanish Justice Minister
Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon rejected the idea, saying it would be
unconstitutional.
"The vote will not be held," he said.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy spoke out later in the day, saying
his government will not allow the Catalan referendum to happen.
Artur Mas announceas
that political parties in Catalonia have agreed to hold a referendum on
independence next November. Photograph: Josep Lago/AFP/Getty Images
Separatist parties in Spain's north-eastern Catalonia
region on Thursday agreed the wording of an independence referendum
proposed for November 2014 but the Spanish government immediately said
the vote was illegal and would not happen.
The Catalan regional
government head, Artur Mas, said the vote would ask two questions: "Do
you want Catalonia to be a state?" and: "Do you want that state to be
independent?"
Spain's justice minister, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón,
immediately said the vote could not take place because the constitution
would not allow it.
A senior US National Security Council staffer has
been fired for using an anonymous Twitter account to send hundreds of
messages criticizing the Obama administration from inside the White
House.
Jofi Joseph, a director in the nuclear non-proliferation team
inside the NSC, was let go a week ago after administration
officials spent months investigating who was tweeting from
@natsecwonk. The account opened in February 2011 and lasted until
last week, sending thousands of tweets critical of Obama’s
policies, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and various
high level officials in the interim.
Two sources in the administration confirmed to The Daily Beast
that Joseph, 40, was behind the account. The staffer was a member
of the NSC team that sat across the negotiating table from Iran
in Istanbul earlier this year.
“Is it just me, or with the Jews celebrating Rosh Hashanah
tonight, is Twitter much quieter?” he once wrote.
“What’s so disturbing about the Hillary dancing photo is the
high-def resolution of Ben Rhodes’ balding pate. And Jake
Sullivan behind him,” another read, referencing US President
Obama’s deputy national security advisor and speechwriter as well
as Vice President Joe Biden’s national security advisor.
A senior National Security Council staffer who was a key member of
the White House team negotiating on Iran’s nuclear weapons program told
POLITICO he deeply regrets tweeting hundreds of anti-administration
messages under the pseudonym @natsecwonk.
Jofi Joseph, 40, was fired from his job on the NSC nuclear
non-proliferation team a week ago after a months-long probe into a
barrage of tweets that included caustic criticisms of former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton and top NSC officials, especially Ben Rhodes –
whom he accused of dodging questions about Benghazi.
“It has been a privilege to serve in this Administration and I deeply
regret violating the trust and confidence placed in me,” Joseph told
POLITICO in an email.
“What started out as an intended parody account of DC culture
developed over time into a series of inappropriate and mean-spirited
comments. I bear complete responsibility for this affair and
I sincerely apologize to everyone I insulted.”
(Also on POLITICO: White House official fired for tweets)
Obama spokesman Eric Schultz confirmed that Joseph had left the
White House – and that he no longer had his top security clearances.
In the course of their investigations, officials also told Joseph
they suspected he was responsible for a second anonymous Twitter account
“@dchobbyist” which included racier tweets about sexual encounters,
escort services – and the inner workings of the State Department.
“Wow, you look amazingly sexy in this photo!” the @dchobbyist wrote in an Oct. 5th post.
“That was him,” a person briefed on the probe told POLITICO.
Joseph didn’t respond to a request for comment on the second account.
Joseph, who was part of the White House team that opened up
preliminary negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program in Istanbul earlier
this year, lived a double life, working with NSC officials and State
Department higher-ups on the most sensitive issues while secretly
tweet-bombing them with comments like: “’Has shitty staff.’ #ObamaInThreeWords.”
For months, White House and State department officials searched for
@NatSecWonk, a hunt that intensified after he repeatedly expressed
doubts about the official administration accounts about the Sept. 11,
2012 attack in Benghazi.
After a probe that included an investigation into Joseph’s travel and
shopping patterns – parsed from over 2,000 tweets - lawyers from the
White House counsel’s office confronted Joseph and ordered him to leave
the executive complex, according to two sources familiar with the
situation. Joseph had been scheduled to rotate out of White House duty
to a senior job in the Pentagon, an administration official told
POLITICO.
The revelation that Joseph was @natsecwonk came as a shock because
Joseph was a familiar figure in the foreign policy world – as is his
wife Carolyn Leddy, a highly-regarded staffer on the Republican side of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to Daily Beast reporter Josh Rogin.
I have watched with growing fear the aftermath of the
Egyptian Army and people’s revolt against Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood as
it scrambles to place interim leaders who can present a united front to
the Egyptian people and avoid descending into civil war.
Much of the Egypt analysis coming in so far is biased by whatever side
the writers happen to be supporting and of little value to us as we have
been aware of the ideological disputes.
What we need to be looking at now is who internally in Egypt is
responsible for what has happened, where certainly one of the options is
both sides, and then have certain foreign players played a key role or
distant one.
There is the usual ‘the US is running the whole show’ side. This of
course is somewhat validated by the annual support to the Egyptian
military.
But we must not forget that this was the military, despite America’s
standing with Mubarak until almost the end, that went over to the people
when they saw he was toast. By siding with the people they saved their
own domestic respect, credibility, and privileges. Michel Chossudovsky posesthat the US is manipulating both sides and uses a military.com quote to support the claim:
“US Defense Secretary Hagel and US Chief of Staff
General Martin Dempsey were walking a fine line expressing concern
while attempting to avoid the impression that the US was manipulating
events behind the scene.”
Dempsey is known for his steady hand
But an obvious omission here by Chossudovsky is that
the US military does not make policy, and peer to peer communications
in all situations of turbulence are quite normal.
To cast them undoubtedly as evidence of control and manipulation is a
stretch. The Army obviously made the call as it was their behinds on
the line if Tahrir Two turns into a debacle. Kevin Barrett also feels
that the Morsi overthrow was a US covert coup, detailing a long history
of the tactic being used. Constant involvement in other countries
affairs always exposes you to blame for anything that happens there that
no one likes.
You end up with ‘anti-American’ feelings (or more of them) which
could have been avoided simply by keeping a distance. Our Founding
Fathers warned us about this but America has lost its way in this
regard.
Edward Peck, former US ambassador to Iraq, and
with top sources in Washington. weighed in on the opposite side. “I
think that the government of the United States is a little bit confused
about what to do… I think anyone who believes that the U.S. or any other
country can direct the events in Egypt is badly mistaken.”
I will now jump in here with the caveat that I have no crystal ball
but will try to add some dispassionate analysis and some new input from
other sources. Foreign Minister Hague recently said, that Britain
planned to work with the interim government “as a practical matter” as
many British citizens and businesses are in Egypt and international life
must go on during these political turmoils.
Camp David Accords – Far away…and long ago…but still with us today
The same goes for the US. We obviously were working with the Morsi government and it should come as no surprise that holding fast to the Camp David Accordswould be a top priority. It would be naive to think otherwise.
American support for Israel is not going to disappear overnight based
on what happens in another country, but only after a long hard fight
back here at home where we clean out of the Lobby infiltrators,
subversives and their fellow travelers.
The world has watched the continuing political/religious struggle
inside Egypt for a variety of reasons as Tahrir One was an historic
event. The Muslim Brotherhood came in on the tail end of that. The young
people had initiated and carried the revolution on their own shoulders
through the most difficult and dangerous period, with the Army finally
joining in to tip the tide.
So the MB had no problem with the people and the army teaming up to
remove a democratically elected government when it paved the way for
their possibly realizing their dream of running Egypt as an Islamic
state. The current showdown began in earnest with the
second year anniversary of the 2011 revolution in late January. Morsi
had already burned bridges with the opposition with his decree that none
of his presidential edicts could be reversed by the courts, which
earned him the nickname the “New Pharaoh.”
Is the Brotherhood trying to resurrect the politically dead?
The opposition became more outspoken and called for removal of the ‘dictatorship’ and trials of its top figures, which we might still see.
Tensions flared with the famous Salafi cleric Mahmoud Shaabanbeing
arrested for inciting violence against NSF leaders when he said on
February 2nd that for their [NSF] wanting to get rid of the Morsi
government that “it was clear that their sentence in God’s law was
death.” That was waving a red flag in front of the army.
20 Examples Of How America Is Rapidly Going Down The Toilet
By Michael, on June 13th, 2013
Deep
corruption is eating away at every level of American society like
cancer. We can see this in our families, we can see this in our
businesses, and we can especially see this in our government. We have
the highest rate of divorce in the world, we have the highest rate of
teen pregnancy in the world, we have the highest rate of obesity in
world, and nobody has higher rates of cancer, heart disease and diabetes
than we do. The suicide rate is soaring and our economy is falling
apart. Meanwhile, our politicians seem absolutely clueless and we have
piled up the biggest mountain of debt that the world has ever seen. Has
America ever been in such bad shape before? The following are 20
examples of how America is rapidly going down the toilet… #1 Why do so many members of the media have family
members that work for the White House? Is this one of the reasons why
the mainstream media is so soft on Obama? Just check out the following
list which was recently compiled by the Washington Post…
The list of prominent news people with close White House relations includes ABC News President Ben Sherwood,
who is the brother of Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a top
national-security adviser to President Obama. His counterpart at CBS,
news division president David Rhodes, is the brother of Benjamin Rhodes, a key foreign-policy specialist. CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, who until earlier this year was deputy secretary of state under Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Further, White House press secretary Jay Carney’s wife is Claire Shipman, a veteran reporter for ABC. And NPR’s White House correspondent, Ari Shapiro, is married to a lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, who joined the White House counsel’s office in April.
#2 Why are IRS agents training with AR-15 rifles? Exactly who do those IRS agents expect to be using those weapons against? #3 The city of Detroit is on the verge of declaring
the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, but a 41-year-old city
worker is about to starting drawing a $96,000 annual pension…
Matt Schenk isn’t your average retiree. He’s 41, works
full-time and collects $194,000 a year at the Detroit Water and Sewerage
Department.
But as soon as next month, he’ll start collecting an estimated
$96,000 annual pension, courtesy of an early retirement incentive
offered to Wayne County appointees. It had no age restriction.
#4 The number of sexual assaults in the U.S. military is up 35 percent since 2010. #5 The suicide rate for Americans between the ages of 35 and 64 rose by close to 30 percent
between 1999 and 2010. The number of Americans that are killed by
suicide now exceeds the number of Americans that die as a result of car
accidents. #6 The United States has the highest rate of obesity on the planet by far. The U.S. also has the highest rate of cancer, the highest rate of heart disease and the highest rate of diabetes. #7 An illegal immigrant brutally raped and killed a 9-month-old girl
in Richland, Washington recently, but you won’t hear anything about it
from the big mainstream news networks because it might hurt the
immigration bill being pushed through Congress. #8 Even though the United States has been able to
fully secure the border between North Korea and South Korea for the past
60 years, U.S. Senator Check Schumer says that it would take “years and years and years” to secure the border between the United States and Mexico. #9 All over America illegal immigrants are turning pleasant communities into crime-infested cesspools. The following is what Doug Hoagland says is going on down in California…
Members of Congress seem to be playing a game of one-upsmanship in their increasingly hawkish reactions to the NSA leaks. Democrat Dianne Feinstein said whistleblower Edward Snowden committed an act of treason, and now Republican Peter King has decided that any journalists who reported the information leaked by Snowden should face criminal prosecution.
Anderson Cooper asked King if he thinks journalists revealing this information should be targeted. "Do you believe they should be punished as well? King said that they unequivocally should, and though he didn't mention any specific names, he was mainly referring to Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who printed exclusive after exclusive with more information on government surveillance programs.
Here is King's comment in its entirety: "Actually, if they--if they knew that this was classified information--I think action should be taken, especially on something of this magnitude. I know that the whole issue of leaks has been gone into over the last month. I think something on this magnitude, there is an obligation, both moral but also legal, I believe, against a reporter disclosing something which would so severely compromise national security. As a practical matter, I--I guess it happened in the past several years, a number of reporters who have been prosecuted under us, so the answer is yes to your question."
On Monday, King declared Snowden to be not just a threat to national security, but "dangerous to the country" and a "defector."
General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency (NSA) is expected to appear before the Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) to answer for PRISM.
Senator Ron Wyden wants
hearings to be scheduled for Alexander and others to answer
Congressional questions to explain once and for all he details about the
government’s surveillance program.
House Speaker John Boehner and Senator Dianne Feinstein are adamant
that Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower, is a traitor and should be dealt
with accordingly.
Closed meetings between federal intelligence heads and Federal Bureau
of Investigations (FBI) officials have taken place to discuss how to
deal with the NSA leak.
With PRISM becoming a household name, those surveillance organizations working for the Obama administration are concerned about those programs that have yet to be exposed.
Chuck Hagel, Defense Secretary, has demanded that the Department of
Defense (DoD) make sure that private sector contractors are clear that
whistleblowing will not be tolerated.
The need for relationships of trust between those corporations and
the federal government is necessary for the surveillance programs to
continue.
In essence, it is the whistleblower that could take down the system.
Mainstream media (MSM) would have the populace believe that government surveillance is perfectly fine – as long as the citizens are told that they are being watched.
Under the PRISM program data collecting on citizens includes knowing:
• Websites visited
• IP addresses
• Type of device used
• Search terms used
• Passwords and logins
Alan F Westin, professor of public law and government at Columbia University, explained
in an op-ed piece that: “American society is in the midst of a great
debate over privacy, precipitated by the development and use of new
surveillance devices and processes by both public and private
authorities.”
Westin points out that the concern of the masses is that “these new
means of augmented surveillance over individuals and groups now spans
the ideological spectrum from extreme left to hard right. Worried
protests against ‘Big Brother’ tendencies have become a staple item in
the press, government proceedings, law reviews, and social science
journals.”
The Signals Intelligence Service
(SIS), begun after World War II and the pre-cursor for the NSA, dealt
with telegraph corporations, much as the NSA collaborates with internet
service providers (ISPs).
Under Project Shamrock , agents would be given telegraph intelligence under the cover of night through literal back-door deals.
For 30 years, Project Shamrock provided intelligence and was only
exposed by Senator Frank Church during a Congressional investigation.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) was passed to prevent another Project Shamrock from being
implemented in secret by intelligence agencies within the federal
government.
Since the George W. Bush Administration FISA has been twisted and
broken with the advent of warrantless wiretapping. The Obama
administration has taken FISA a step further and sought to manipulate it
for their purposes to make illegal activity legal.
In a propaganda piece meant to discredit Snowden, USA Today and Verizon Wireless released a short broadcast that exposes the whistleblower.
• Snowden being in Hong Kong is fortuitous because of it’s connections to major cities across the globe through airports.
• Lindsey Mills, Snowden’s girlfriend is missing.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) is preparing a criminal case against
Snowden, at the behest of the Obama administration. The FBI has been
sent to interview Snowden’s friends and family.
Snowden has released documents
that show the National Security Agency (NSA) has been involved in
hacking attacks on officials in China, the Hong Kong University and
students.
Snowden says that the NSA is conducting more than 61,000 cyber attacks globally.
He said: “We hack network backbones — like huge internet routers,
basically — that give us access to the communications of hundreds of
thousands of computers without having to hack every single one. Last
week the American government happily operated in the shadows with no
respect for the consent of the governed, but no longer.”
Snowden explained: “People who think I made a mistake in picking Hong
Kong as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide
from justice; I am here to reveal criminality… My intention is to ask
the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.”
Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, former chief security officer for Hong Kong said that it was in Snowden’s “best interest to leave Hong Kong.”
House Representative Peter King adamantly declared that Snowden is
“either a defector or traitor. “I think what he’s done has done
incredible damage to our country. It’s going to put American lives at
risk.”
King said that journalists should be punished for doing their job of
exposing corruption “if they willingly knew that this was classified
information, I think actions should be taken, especially something of
this magnitude. I think something on this magnitude there is an
obligation both moral but also legal I believe against a reporter
disclosing something which would so severely compromise national
security.”
King claims that whistleblowers are aiding al-Qaeda by exposing the
details on how the US government conducts surveillance operations.
He said: “By giving [al-Qaeda] such detail about what we are doing that enables them to adjust their tactics.”
Getty Images
The exposure of the PRISM data-collection program might not fall
squarely under the heading of the third annual International Cyber
Security Conference, which concluded on Wednesday at Tel Aviv
University. The secret data-collection program, by which U.S. intelligence agencies routinely vacuum up huge amounts of private communications from
Internet users, stands outside the realm of safeguarding the cyberworld
from attacks. PRISM is defended as an antiterrorism measure, necessary to detect plots as they are hatched between evildoers communicating with one another online.
But it turns out that, from the point of view of the watchers
gathered in Tel Aviv, it’s all about expanding their gaze even further.
The chairman of RSA, the digital-security company best known for its
password key fobs, made the case for “full visibility into all data” as
essential to detecting and thwarting threats to the cyberworld as well.
Art Coviello, who is also executive vice president of EMC, which now
owns RSA, said computer security is no longer about throwing up a fire
wall between a piece of equipment and the outside world. Consumers
now move between so many digital devices, and entrust information to
the cloud, that the idea of “a perimeter” has been falling apart since
2007. Coviello gestured to zettabytes —
four levels up from a gigabyte — to drive home his point that there’s
just too much data moving out there to protect on site: understanding,
he said, that 1 zetta is equal to 4.9 quadrillion books, the world
traffic in data was a quarter of a zettabyte in 2007, but had become 2
zettabytes in 2013 and by 2020 might be 40, or even 60.
By Amanda Warren
By Michael, on June 13th, 2013 
