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  1. #26
    Boring = 4 Rings SA210's Avatar
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    Ben Swann Full Disclosure is asking the questions the rest of the media is ignoring. Even by the overreaching standards of the Patriot Act, Ben Swann demonstrates how the NSA's Prism program is clearly illegal.

  2. #27
    Boring = 4 Rings SA210's Avatar
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  3. #28
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    C.I.A. Warning on Snowden in ’09 Said to Slip Through the Cracks

    Just as Edward J. Snowden was preparing to leave Geneva and a job as a C.I.A. technician in 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man’s behavior and work habits, as well as a troubling su ion.

    The C.I.A. suspected that Mr. Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access, and decided to send him home, according to two senior American officials.


    But the red flags went unheeded. Mr. Snowden left the C.I.A. to become a contractor for the National Security Agency, and four years later he leaked thousands of classified do ents. The supervisor’s cautionary note and the C.I.A.’s su ions apparently were not forwarded to the N.S.A. or its contractors, and surfaced only after federal investigators began scrutinizing Mr. Snowden’s record once the do ents began spilling out, intelligence and law enforcement officials said.


    “It slipped through the cracks,” one veteran law enforcement official said of the report.

    http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/11...?from=homepage

    just like the alert from the Russians about the Boston bombers "slipped through the cracks"

    $50B+ /year and we get these Keystone Kops protecting America

  4. #29
    Moss is Da Sauce! mouse's Avatar
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    $50B+ /year and we get these Keystone Kops protecting America
    Not true they did go after that woman for downloading music.

  5. #30
    Veteran EVAY's Avatar
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    TRAITOR

  6. #31
    Deandre Jordan Sucks m>s's Avatar
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    he'll be pardoned and allowed back after the revolution, and go down as a hero.

  7. #32
    Scarlett our Goddess4ever
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    Snowden is a hero absolutely, otherwise when your phone or AIM account got hacked you'd never know who did it.

  8. #33
    Veteran HI-FI's Avatar
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    maybe a little of both. even if he were a double agent for Russia all along, it doesn't mean what he exposed isn't any less troubling.

    there was a whisteblower who helped build the system who has been warning people all along as well, he deserves some credit too.

  9. #34
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    the militarized police, national security surveillance state genie is out of the lantern, and it won't ever go back in. Human-Americans are ed and un able. Voting is a useless charade.

    Patriot Act author prepares bill to put NSA bulk collection 'out of business'

    The conservative Republican who co-authored America's Patriot Act is preparing to unveil bipartisan legislation that would dramatically curtail the domestic surveillance powers it gives to intelligence agencies.

    Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who worked with president George W Bush to give more power to US intelligence agencies after the September 11 terrorist attacks, said the intelligence community had misused those powers by collecting telephone records on all Americans, and claimed it was time "to put their metadata program out of business".


    His imminent bill in the House of Representatives is expected to be matched by a similar proposal from Senate judiciary committee chair Patrick Leahy, a Democrat. It pulls together existing congressional efforts to reform the National Security Agency in the wake of disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden.


    Sensenbrenner has called his bill the Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-Collection, and Online Monitoring Act – or USA Freedom Act, and a draft seen by the Guardian has four broad aims.


    http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...ct-author-bill

    Clapper outright, blatantly, seriously lied to Congress (didn't get the same investigation as lying pro athletes), as indicator that the national security state, NSA/CIA, is totally beyond the reach of civilians.


  10. #35
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    “If I am a traitor, who did I betray? I gave all of my information to the American public, to American journalists who are reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason I think people really need to consider who do they think they’re working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy. "
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6jYA-ggorU

  11. #36
    W4A1 143 43CK? Nbadan's Avatar
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    ...if you think about it, all Snowden did was confirm what conspiracy theorists on the far left and some like Alex Jones, on the far right had been saying all along...score one for conspiracy theorists.....9/11 was the premise for enacting TIA domestically...blame it on Obama all you want but domestic spying and electronic surveillance was already big when Obama took his oath on the Koran....

  12. #37
    W4A1 143 43CK? Nbadan's Avatar
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    maybe a little of both. even if he were a double agent for Russia all along, it doesn't mean what he exposed isn't any less troubling.
    That's why Snowden has to be prosecuted..and probably should do some time and then be pardoned.had he stayed here like Bradley Manning I would favor a full pardon....I hope Obama pardons Manning on his way out the door..

  13. #38
    Controversy Koolaid_Man's Avatar
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    He deserves the death penalty...China and Russia took what they wanted he was powerless to stop them. He's a traitor...State secrets should be kept secret as long as killing natural born citizens aren't part of the equation. You guys have a very narrow view of world politics and how it's in our best interest certain things don't get revealed...you cannot run a country without lies and secrecy and neither can your allies and enemies...soldiers are putting their lives on the line and a little punk like Snowden thinks he can steal info and jeapordize their lives and missions...you clowns should put yourself in the Presidents chair..., secretary of Defense, the CIA, the FBI, high ranking Pentagon officials who are working round the clock to keep America safe from it's enemies...

    Snowden deserves the death penalty...they wanna hack emails..who cares just gonna find a bunch of porn and ...I ain't got nothing going on except macking Ho's so access my who cares...he's no ing hero...Putin would have executed him on the spot if he were Russian...so ohhh the irony of Putin giving him refuge...now he's in a place (Russia) who's State secrets make the US look like sainthood...

  14. #39
    Believe. AntiChrist's Avatar
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    ...if you think about it, all Snowden did was confirm what conspiracy theorists on the far left and some like Alex Jones, on the far right had been saying all along...score one for conspiracy theorists.....9/11 was the premise for enacting TIA domestically...blame it on Obama all you want but domestic spying and electronic surveillance was already big when Obama took his oath on the Koran....


  15. #40
    W4A1 143 43CK? Nbadan's Avatar
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    Two Norwegian politicians say they have jointly nominated former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden for the 2014 Nobel peace prize. Socialist politicians Baard Vegar Solhjell, a former environment minister, and Snorre Valen said the public debate and policy changes "in the wake of Snowden's whistleblowing has contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order".

    Being nominated means Snowden will be one of scores of names that the Nobel committee will consider for the prestigious award. The five-member panel will not confirm who has been nominated but those who submit nominations sometimes make them public.

    Nominators, including members of national parliaments and governments, university professors and previous laureates, must enter their submissions by 1 February. The prize committee members can add their own candidates at their first meeting after that deadline.

    Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...el-peace-prize

  16. #41
    Believe. AntiChrist's Avatar
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  17. #42
    Got Woke? DMC's Avatar
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    Neither hero nor traitor. He's an opportunist. It's about him, nothing more.

  18. #43
    🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆 ElNono's Avatar
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    Enrique

  19. #44
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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  20. #45
    I play pretty, no? TeyshaBlue's Avatar
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    The comment section to that blog post is incredible.

  21. #46
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    the Graziani comment @2:02 was the first one I paused on. which stuck out for you?

  22. #47
    I play pretty, no? TeyshaBlue's Avatar
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    I thought this one was particularly enlightening....lots of moving parts.
    Adjuvant • January 17, 2014 3:05 AM
    @glasnost, Nick P, et al.:
    I'm going to continue in a very US-centric vein here, so apologies in advance to foreign readers.
    This discussion reminds me of a point I brought up earlier regarding laws which are kept secret from our legislators. The most egregious example of this phenomenon I have found is the fact that some unknown subset of that Continuity of Government provisions enacted on September 11, 2001 (and more formally two days later) continues in effect to this day, and the State of Emergency under which this national has been governed has been quietly renewed every year since. Not once in 12 years has there been a review of this State of Emergency by the Congress, as mandated by 50 USC § 1622(b).
    I also previously reproduced Congressman DeFazio's indignant speech on this issue, after both he and the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee on which he sits were denied access to the details of these programs on the grounds that they lacked the clearances.
    Presumably 50 USC § 1622 is no longer operative, having been overruled by some supervening regulation, some "higher" *secret* "law." Any attempts by members of Congress to ascertain how this might be possible have met with no success. The secret secret is secret, you see. According to Prof. Peter Dale Scott (Ph. D Poli Sci, McGill; former Canadian diplomat; Prof. Emeritus of English, UC Berkeley) who has researched this issue,
    "Former Congressman Dan Hamburg and I appealed publicly in 2009, both to President Obama to terminate the emergency, and to Congress to hold the hearings required of them by statute.47 But Obama, without discussion, extended the 9/11 Emergency again on September 10, 2009,48 and again a year later.49 Meanwhile Congress has continued to ignore its statutory obligations.
    One Congressman explained to a cons uent that the provisions of the National Emergencies Act have now been rendered inoperative by COG. If true, this would indicate that the cons utional system of checks and balances no longer applies, and also that secret decrees now override public legislation as the law of the land.
    I still maintain that the Continuity of Government provisions represent, as I stated earlier, "the [extra-]cons utional nest from which this army of legal roaches proceeds." Consider their provenance. This time I will quote Project Censored's summary at length on this point (emphases mine):
    In July 1987, during the Iran-Contra Hearings grilling of Oliver North, the American public got a glimpse of “highly sensitive” emergency planning North had been involved in. Ostensibly these were emergency plans to suspend the American cons ution in the event of a nuclear attack.
    Oliver North was involved with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in plans to take over federal, state and local functions during a national emergency. This planning for 'Continuity of Government' (COG) called for 'suspension of the Cons ution, turning control of the government over to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law.' Two of the key COG planners on the secret committee were Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the two men who implemented COG under 9/11.
    In other words extraordinary emergency measures, originally designed for an America devastated in a nuclear attack, are now to be applied to anything the White House considered an emergency. Cheney and Rumsfeld continued their secret planning when Clinton was president; both men, both Republicans, were heads of major corporations and not even in the government at that time.
    What few have recognized is that, nearly a decade later, some aspects of COG remain in effect. COG plans are still authorized by a proclamation of emergency that has been extended each year by presidential authority, most recently by President Obama in September 2009. COG plans are also the probable source for the 1000-page Patriot Act presented to Congress five days after 9/11, and also for the Department of Homeland Security’s Project Endgame — a ten-year plan, initiated in September 2001, to expand detention camps, at a cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007 alone."
    Project Censored goes on to mention 50 USC § 1622 and its mysterious non-application.
    In the hopes of retaining the interest of this readership, allow me take this discussion on a slightly different tack.
    This blog has often hosted discussions on subversion of hardware, down to the level of the silicon. It is possible to insert backdoors which are ineradicable and capable of calling forth all manner of higher-level exploits, subverting firmware. I believe what we are witnessing here with Continuity of Government provisions is directly analgous: the backdooring of a national legal system at the [sub-]Cons utional level, using a mechanism originally meant to take effect in the most extreme existential emergency but reworked for nefarious purposes (a sort of legal JTAG header, if you will), and the wholesale suborning of the national legal framework thereby from the firmware (Cons ution) up.
    I have referred to this previously as a problem of "parallel cons utionalism": we have our system of public laws, and we have the secret "laws" and interpretations which have in many cases superseded them. We are unable to directly observe this body of secret "laws" because it is, of course, secret (closed-source and obfuscated and/or encrypted code, to continue our analogy).
    This duality has made itself manifest in a wide assortment of practical (legal) particulars, as one would expect in an compromised (legal) system. Addressing any of these particular manifestations individually will, of course, fail to reverse the overall system compromise if, as I hypothesize, they proceed (in whole or in part) from a subversive, alternative, and secret quasi-Cons ution (reflashed BIOS/firmware) which has been enabled by the subversion of lower-level components (the silicon-level backdoor or JTAG header of our analogy -- or the need for a plan for Continuity of Government in the face of nuclear Armageddon in fact).
    If we are to make any sense of the secret laws (persistent and recurring infections of advanced, obfuscated and encrypted malware), we must first make sense of the subverted legal framework (hardware and firmware) within which they operate. To disinfect the system and neutralize the Advanced Persistent (Cons utional) Threat, we must attempt find and neutralize the [sub-]Cons utional-level (silicon) backdoor, then restore the original [Cons utional] firmware. For this to be done, the coders (legislators) must, at a start, be able to understand the silicon backdoor (Continuity of Government) and, ideally, decrypt or reverse-engineer the subverted firmware (Cons utional and pseudo-Cons utional law).
    I am not the first, by any means, to draw the analogy between law and code (a hat tip, above all, to Stallman and Lessig) on that point). I hope that my extended analogy, unwieldy and imperfect as it is, will be found helpful. It's meant only as a brief and extemporaneous sketch, but perhaps it may serve as a starting point for further discussion.

  23. #48
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    in two words, shadow government

  24. #49
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    The Menace of the Military Mind

    I had my first experience with the U.S. military when I was a young reporter covering the civil war in El Salvador. We journalists were briefed at the American Embassy each week by a U.S. Army colonel who at the time headed the military group of U.S. advisers to the Salvadoran army. The reality of the war, which lasted from 1979 to 1992, bore little resemblance to the description regurgitated each week for consumption by the press. But what was most evident was not the blatant misinformation—this particular colonel had apparently learned to dissemble to the public during his multiple tours in Vietnam—but the hatred of the press by this man and most other senior officers in the U.S. military. When first told that he would have to meet the press once a week, the colonel reportedly protested against having to waste his time with those “limp- ed communists.”

    Homer in “The Iliad” showed his understanding of war. His heroes are not pleasant men. They are vain, imperial, filled with rage and violent. And Homer’s central character in “The Odyssey,” Odysseus, in his journey home from war must learn to shed his “hero’s heart,” to strip from himself the military attributes that served him in war but threaten to doom him off the battlefield. The qualities that serve us in war defeat us in peace.

    Most ins utions have a propensity to promote mediocrities, those whose primary strengths are knowing where power lies, being subservient and obsequious to the centers of power and never letting morality get in the way of one’s career. The military is the worst in this respect. In the military, whether at the Paris Island boot camp or West Point, you are trained not to think but to obey. What amazes me about the military is how stupid and bovine its senior officers are. Those with brains and the willingness to use them seem to be pushed out long before they can rise to the senior-officer ranks.

    The many Army generals I met over the years not only lacked the most rudimentary creativity and independence of thought but nearly always saw the press, as well as an informed public, as impinging on their love of order, regimentation, unwavering obedience to authority and single-minded use of force to solve complex problems.

    So when I heard James R. Clapper Jr., a retired Air Force lieutenant general and currently the federal government’s director of national intelligence, denounce Edward Snowdenand his “accomplices”—meaning journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras—before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week I was not surprised. Clapper charged, without offering any evidence, that the Snowden disclosures had caused “profound damage” and endangered American lives. And all who have aided Snowden are, it appears, guilty of treason in Clapper’s eyes.

    Clapper and many others who have come out of the military discern no difference between terrorists and reporters, and by reporters I am not referring to the boot-licking courtiers on television and in Washington who masquerade as reporters. Carry out an interview with a member of al-Qaida, as I have, and you become in the eyes of generals like Clapper a member of al-Qaida. Most generals I know recognize no need for an independent press. The munchkins who dutifully sit through their press briefings or follow them around in preapproved press pools and publish their lies are the generals’ idea of journalism.

    “In the absence of contrasting views, the very highest form of propaganda warfare can be fought: the propaganda for a definition of reality within which only certain limited viewpoints are possible,” C. Wright Mills wrote. “What is being promulgated and reinforced is the military metaphysics—the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military.

    This is why people like James Clapper and the bloated military and security and surveillance apparatus must not have unchecked power to conduct wholesale surveillance, to carry out extraordinary renditions and to imprison Americans indefinitely as terrorists.

    This is why the nation, as our political system remains mired in paralysis, must stop glorifying military values. In times of turmoil the military always seems to be a good alternative. It presents the facade of order. But order in the military, as the people of Egypt are now learning again, is akin to slavery. It is the order of a prison. And that is where Clapper and his fellow generals and intelligence chiefs would like to place any citizen who dares to question their unimpeded right to turn us all into mindless recruits. They have the power to make their demented dreams a reality. And it is our task to take this power from them.


    http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/..._mind_20140203


  25. #50
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    in two words, shadow government
    Equally as corrupt as the shadow, (unregulated) banking system.

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