Editor’s note: An Infowars reader sent the following collection of links to news stories demonstrating how the corporate media in collusion with the elite are pushing world depopulation and one-child policies under the cover of the hyped-up junk science theory of climate change.
In a Campaign for Liberty video commentary, Ron Paul reveals that even though up to 20 Democrats opposed the controversial climate bill, they voted for it anyway, underscoring once again how the vast majority of Congress members are bought and paid for by the elite in Washington.
The Congressman points out that the eight Republicans who voted for the bill did so in order to provide political cover for the Democrats. Even if those Republicans had not defected, some of the 44 Democrats who voted against the bill would have changed their votes anyway to ensure the bill’s passage.
“One Democrat talked to me, a friend of mine,” said Paul, “and I said how are you going to vote on this bill and he said I’m going to vote for the bill but then he sort of whispered and he said, but I sure hope it doesn’t pass.”
Asked why he was voting for a bill that he actually opposed, the Democrat responded, “yeah I have to do that.”
“I said are there any other Democrats that are going to be voting for it and they really don’t like the bill, and he said, oh yeah about 15 or 20 of them,” added Paul.
This underlines how Washington is completely corrupt at its core and how, even if individual members of Congress oppose a bill, they vote for it anyway just to satisfy the agenda of the elite and maintain the status quo.
If the 15 or 20 Democrats who opposed the bill had actually voted against it, the bill would have failed and America would not be facing another great depression, a massive lowering of living standards, and the complete regulation of every aspect of our lives, all of which the climate bill will grease the skids for.
Paul compares the carbon trading scam, a system that is owned and will benefit to the tune of billions or even trillions of dollars long time environmental hysterics like Al Gore and Maurice Strong, to how the Catholic Church sold indulgences to sinners from the 10th century onwards.
The Congressman illustrates how the Obama administration has cited Spain as an example of how a “progressive energy policy” can be successful, when in fact Spain is in economic turmoil partly as a result of this very policy.
“The administration has pointed to Spain as a shining example of this type of progressive energy policy. Spain has been massively diverting capital from the private sector into politically favored environmental projects for the better part of a decade, and many in Washington apparently like what they see. However, under no circumstances should anyone serious about economic recovery emulate an economy that is now approaching 20 percent unemployment, where every green job created, eliminated 2.2 real jobs and cost around $800,000 each!”
“The real inconvenient truth is that the cost of government regulations, taxes, fees, red tape and bureaucracy is a considerable expense that has to be considered when companies decide where to do business and how many people they can afford to hire. Increasing governmental burden directly causes capital flight and job losses, as Spain has learned. In this global economy its easy enough for businesses to relocate to countries that are more politically friendly to economic growth. If our government continues to kick the economy while its down, it will be a long time before it gets back up. In fact, jobs are much more likely to go overseas, compounding our problems.”
Paul concludes by pointing out that the climate bill is based around the manufactured threat of global warming and that even if one accepts the premise that CO2 emissions cause significant temperature increases, the biggest polluters, the U.S. government and specifically the U.S. military, will be exempt from most of the new EPA regulations anyway.
Watch the clip of the Congressman’s comments below.
Richard Linklater’s 2001 film, Waking Life, will air on The Independent Film Channel this weekend. Alex Jones appears in the film. For a more detailed synopsis visit the IFC page.
Saturday, Jun. 6 at 6:15 AM EDT
Saturday, Jun. 6 at 2:00 PM EDT
Friday, Jun. 19 at 6:00 AM EDT
Friday, Jun. 19 at 12:00 PM ED
Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor last year accepted an invitation to join the Belizean Grove, an elite but little-known women’s-only group.
Founded nearly 10 years ago as the female answer to the Bohemian Grove — a secretive all-male club whose members have included former U.S. presidents and top business leaders — the Belizean Grove has about 125 members, including Army generals, Wall Street executives and former ambassadors.
Sotomayor’s membership in the New York-based group became public Thursday afternoon in a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Having observed the power of the Bohemian Grove, a 130-year-old, elite old boys’ network of former Presidents, businessmen, military, musicians, academics, and non-profit leaders, and realizing that women didn’t have a similar organization, Susan Stautberg and 26 other founding members created the Belizean Grove, a constellation of influential women who are key decision makers in the profit, non-profit and social sectors; who build long term mutually beneficial relationships in order to both take charge of their own destinies and help others to do the same.
Susan Stautberg (a former Washington bureau chief for Westinghouse Broadcasting) said she’d like to keep the Belizean Grove under the media radar. In other words, you’re not supposed to know anything about an exclusive, invitation-only club organized by the ruling elite and their minions.
The elite want to conduct their plotting and conspiracies in the dark. Remember how angry CFR member David Gergen got when Alex Jones confronted him on his participation at Bohemian Grove.
The discovery of Sotomayor’s inclusion in the secretive Belizean Grove club is merely another indication that she is a minion of the global elite and her appointment to the Supreme Court will mean the globalist agenda will go forward — and that agenda includes the ultimate subversion of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the sovereignty of the United States.
No word yet if members of the Belizean Grove engage in pagan rituals, dress up in red-hooded robes, cremate a coffin effigy of “Dull Care” at the base of a 40 foot owl altar, and romp with homosexuals like their male counterparts do at Bohemian Grove.
In a 1934 letter, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote to her financial sponsor, Clarence Gamble (the Proctor & Gamble heir) :
“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
2007:
Speaking before Rockefeller sponsored Planned Parenthood’s ‘Action fund’ banquet July 17th 2007, candidate Barack Obama made his public announcement that his ‘first act as President’ would be signing FOCA (”Freedom of Choice Act”) It was.
The “Freedom of Choice” act amounts to de-regulation of the abortion industry and provides free federally funded abortions on demand. Obama is that ‘colored minister with social-service background and engaging personality’ Sanger envisioned.
Planned Parenthood’s slogan last year — “why should I be punished with a baby?”– was featured in television commercial campaigns.
Obama mouthed this very slogan at a campaign speech in Johnstown PA:”I have two daughters. If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby”.
PLANNED PARENTHOOD operates the largest chain of abortion clinics in the US. It has more than 850 “Health Centers” (abortion centers), 80% are in minority neighborhoods. The organization performed 22 percent of all abortions in 2005 (260,000 out of 1.2 million abortions.)
According to a Fox TV story, “Blacks do, indeed, have much higher rates of abortions than whites or other minority groups. In 2000, while blacks made up 17 percent of live births, they made up more than twice that share of abortions (36 percent). If those aborted children had been born, the number of blacks born would have been slightly over 50 percent greater than it was.
The comparison with whites and other minorities is striking. Whites made up 78 percent of live births, but only 57 percent of abortions. Non-black minorities had 7 percent of live births and 5 percent of abortions. Data from 1973 on indicate that black women’s share of abortions has consistently been at least twice their share of live births.”
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
According to “Klan Parenthood,” A black baby is three times more likely to be murdered in the womb than a white baby. Since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by over 25 percent. Twice as many African-Americans have died from abortion than have died from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined. Every three days, more African-Americans are killed by abortion than have been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in its entire history. About 13 percent of American women are black, but they submit to over 35 percent of the abortions.”
THE ABORTION INDUSTRY
Bernard Nathanson, M.D., co-founder of pro-abortion “National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws” recalled creating the slogans for ‘pro-choice’ public relations with Betty Friedan back in 1968. Such slogans included, “Women must have control over their own bodies.” and “Freedom of choice — a basic American right.”
“I remember laughing when we made those slogans up. We were looking for some sexy, catchy slogans to capture public opinion. They were very cynical slogans then, just as all of these slogans today are very, very cynical.”
It was a racket. Promote the breakdown of marriage while simultaneously promoting promiscuous sex behavior, with abortion as handy backup birth control. The only thing better would be if the federal government covered the abortion cost for impoverished teens — the very demographic targeted by Sanger’s eugenics agenda.
Nathanson andother former abortionists and clinic personnel have come clean after becoming revulsed by the rampant profiteering of abortion providers. Nathanson says all abortion doctors and staff are well aware they’re in the business of terminating live human beings. After performing thousands of procedures, literally butchering the unborn, all rationalizations break down.
Thousands of young women die annually from botched legal abortions performed at a rate of 120 procedures per urban clinic per day, 8 am to midnight shifts, seven days a week. Nathanson himself estimates he’s performed 75,000 abortions during his career as an abortionist. The average cost to the patient for an abortion is around $480.00.
Doctors and staff who do the dirty work are expendable and replaceable. Abortion clinics now are operated as large franchises with profits going to their boards and shareholders. Only so much profit can be had from the abortion market alone, which with Obama’s signing of FOCA will reach saturation shortly. Tax payer funded abortion will increase the numbers to the maximum, but the corporate owners and investors of this industry want more profit.
Human baby corpses — stem cells and tissue — are worth money. What’s left of the ban on wholesale harvesting of aborted human cell tissue has cost investors billions of dollars a year.
Margaret Sanger and Heinrich Himmler probably never dreamed that exterminating ‘undesirables’ could be so profitable. Sanger merely wanted to rid American society of ‘weeds’. Himmler dreamed of his Aryan supermen perpetuating the thousand year Fourth Reich.
Back in November, after sweeping the election, Obama’s crew removed language from his official website calling for mandatory service for all Americans. “Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year,” the site said before the document was scrubbed in response to criticism.
Obama and the Democrats are wedded to the idea of mandatory service. In December 2007, Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd proposed making community service mandatory for all high school students and proposed “encouraging service by adults by offering tax credits to employers who give workers paid time off to volunteer and $1,000 grants for seniors who help out in schools,” MSNBC reported.
In 2006, Rahm Emanuel, now Obama’s chief of staff, published a book entitled “The Plan.” In the book Emanuel argues for universal service for all “Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five [who] will be asked to serve their country by going through three months of basic training, civil defense preparation and community service.”
Democrats love the idea of involuntary servitude. “For America now, service is not just an option, but an obligation of citizenship,” said John Kerry during the 2004 election. In the 110th congress Charles Rangel introduced the Universal National Service Act H.R.393, a bill that would have required all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service for a period of two years.
National service is feel-good code for slavery. It is prohibited by the 13th amendment.
In March, both the House and Senate passed a bill tripling the AmeriCorps program. Called the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, or GIVE Act, the law “encourages” Americans to “give back to their communities,” Fox News reported. Republicans attempted to attach an amendment to the bill prohibiting for-profit political and labor groups that engage in legislative advocacy from receiving “assistance” under the plan, but the amendment was tabled.
We need your service, right now,” Obama declared as he signed the bill. “I’m asking you to stand up and play your part. I’m asking you to help change history’s course… and if you do, I promise you, your life will be richer.”
Obama and Congress will eventually do more than merely ask “you to stand up and play your part” — they will legislate it. In March, H.R. 1444 was introduced in the House by a gaggle of Democrats. The bill will “establish the Congressional Commission on Civic Service to study methods of improving and promoting volunteerism and national service, and for other purposes.”
H.R. 1444 is sponsored by Rep. Jim McDermott, a Washington state Democrat, and is assigned to the House Committee on Labor and Education. It reintroduces language calling for universal servitude stripped from H.R. 1388, the so-called GIVE (to government) bill.
In Section 4. of the proposed bill, entitled “Duties,” we find the following: “The effect on the Nation, on those who serve, and on the families of those who serve, if all individuals in the United States were expected to perform national service or were required to perform a certain amount of national service.” (Emphasis added.) A “workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement” is proposed “for all able young people.”
In addition, the Commission will investigate how to rope older Americans into a national servitude program. “Whether current Federal volunteer programs are suited to address the special skills and needs of senior volunteers, and if not, how these programs can be improved such that the Federal government can effectively promote service among the ‘baby boomer’ generation,” the bill states.
The Commission will also explore the creation of a “public service academy, a 4-year institution that offers a federally funded undergraduate education with a focus on training future public sector leaders.” Federal money would go to establish “a training program on college campuses to recruit and educate college students for national service.”
As Obama said during his GIVE signing speech, he wants to create “a generation of activists” to work with “nonprofit organizations” — that is to say, foundation NGOs — to “strengthen the Nation” as determined by the government and the corporations and bankers that own it.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Our rulers are itching to implement “an era of common sacrifice,” as the Trilateralist David and Bohemian Grove attendee Gergen has called it. “David Gergen is perhaps the most vocal proponent of a new wave of ’social entrepreneurs’ whose businesses are modeled on a ‘more-than-profit’ basis. Most of these groups aim to incorporate a partnership between the public & private sectors (sometimes known as fascism),” writes Aaron Dykes.
Gergen and his one-world buddies consider us little more than a disposable ciphers to be used in their scheme to realize “a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole,” as Carrol Quigley noted.
In order to usher in the New Feudalism, the youth — and the baby boomers — will not only need to be brainwashed into accepting “an era of common sacrifice,” they will need to be forced by law to sacrifice and become slaves for the ruling elite.
The True Story of the Bilderberg Group
The updated, revised, expanded
North American Union Edition
By Daniel Estulin
It is ironic, as Daniel Estulin points out, that America’s fledgling democracy established the Logan act in 1799 to protect itself from Americans fostering foreign associations to intrude in our affairs. Named after Dr. George Logan, a pro Republican and prescient Quaker from Pennsylvania, it has remained almost unchanged and unfortunately unused since its passage, though it reads with great relevance in the shadows of the New World Order’s operatives . . .
It states, “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”
In fact, it is amazing that the Bilderberg Group has met since 1954 with funding from the CIA and is made up of the world’s most powerful people, notably US and world heads of state, made and in the making, numerous international corporate CEOs from business, banking, industry, media, as well as world royalty, plus high-ranking members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tri-Lateral Commission.
The Bilderberg goal has been to shape policy that deeply concerns the United States and its citizens in regards to innumerable foreign alliances without providing US citizens any awareness of same. And not once has any US member been indicted for their treasonous breaches in these actions.
Even though high-ranking members of the press attend Bilderberg annual meetings, there is little or no press coverage. They are there, as it were, to get with and push the program, albeit disguised. The meetings’ locales are announced only days before the events, always in a small town near a big city — this year’s at the five-star Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel in Vouliagmeni, Greece, May 14-17.
There are no press reports of discussions, agendas or conclusions released. Yet the matters discussed ranged this year from all facets of the US economy, including the dollar’s future, whether there will be depression or prolonged stagnation, US unemployment; more frighteningly, even to the destruction of the United States as we know it into the North American Union of Canada, the US, and Mexico.
Even though I read and favorably reviewed Estulin’s Bilderberg 2007: Welcome to the Lunatic Fringe, this new edition of the story lends new urgency to what has been happening in the darkness of the political night we live in, both north and south of us, including newly made associations of corporations, plans to usurp US laws to North American Union imperatives, all part of a scheme to hammer America into the pieces of this NAU like broken glass into an unrecognizable mosaic of oppression.
We in the United States have been endowed with enormous philanthropic foundations, which have been fixing up the world for the last 100 years. One might wonder how their activities relate to the current economic crisis. News on this subject is not found in the headlines, or even on page 23. There is more exposure of foundation garments than of the opulent structures overpinning our system.
Foundations are concerned about the dysfunctions of globalization, and consequently fund many groups active at alternative summits such as the World Social Forum, initiated as a radical response to the World Economic Forum.
We should remember that these institutions, taking to heart the “robber baron” accusation, were not intended to dispense charity, but to apply resources and “social engineering” to forestall the “evils of capitalism.” Thus the Sage Foundation created the field of professional social work. The Rockefeller Foundation, directly and through its subsidiary, the Social Science Research Council, helped to shape New Deal programs, including social security. Its massive manual, Recent Social Trends, was a blueprint for the reform of laissez-faire capitalism. The Ford Foundation created prototypes for the “War on Poverty” programs, and more recently was the designer of Individual Development Accounts to provide funding for worthy low income people.
In addition to the billions donated to non-profit organizations, economic development, and policy-oriented think tanks, foundations have been prime creators of international organizations designed to promote and defend capitalism against any and all threats. After World War I, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations originated the Council on Foreign Relations. Coordinating with its foreign affiliates, it is still going strong. Post World War II, the Bilderberg group was formed (named after the hotel in the Netherlands where the first meeting was held in 1954), an informal palaver that meets in secret (no press and don’t tell) at a different high-security location each year. It gathers the elite of North America and Western Europe; its originators included David Rockefeller, Dean Rusk (then head of the Rockefeller Foundation), Joseph Johnson (head of the Carnegie Endowment), and John J. McCloy (Chairman of the Board of the Ford Foundation), along with European notables. While this encounter does not conclude with any formal plan of action, the idea is that these powerful people have the means to implement the sense of the meeting. The list of attendees provided by aggressive investigative journalists at http://www.bilderberg.com will give an idea of the clout involved. As with similar gatherings, Bilderberg is an arena where rookies are fielded for selection to the big leagues; Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Mary Robinson were invited when aspiring politicians.
Bilderberg was too narrow a selection, as “non-Western” nations are becoming economic “giants.” Primarily initiated by Rockefeller institutions, the Trilateral Commission (Europe, North America, Japan) was convened in 1973 to deal with political threats and economic instabilities in the capitalist world. An even more inclusive gathering became necessary, and foundations and corporations created the World Economic Forum in 1974. In addition to the prime ministers and corporate and foundation executives, it includes rock stars, “emerging young leaders,” and representatives of non-governmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and Third World Network. While some of its sessions are in secret, it has a vast public component, welcoming the press, webcasting the panel discussions, and so forth. Its consistent theme is that globalization and economic growth will promote wealth and happiness for all, although participants are divided among advocates of the “free market” and government regulation.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Foundations are concerned about the dysfunctions of globalization, and consequently fund many groups active at alternative summits such as the World Social Forum, initiated as a radical response to the World Economic Forum. The protesting organizations at the WSF receive grants from pro-globalization foundations and corporations, which also provide general support for the Forum and its regional affiliates. There is now a Funders Network on Trade and Globalization created primarily for the WSF that includes the Ford, Rockefeller, Mott, Tides, and Levi Strauss Foundations, along with progressive funders such as the Funding Exchange and the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program. The group of 160 funders sends a special delegation to the WSF. A major purpose: “The participation of funders and donors has allowed them to build a common analysis, in partnership with their grantees, of the underlying structural causes of community problems: the institutions involved, the flow of money, the constraints on democracy and other factors.”
While promoting/saving/improving capitalism over the long term, foundations are also deeply entrenched in the corporate sector, including the military-industrial complex and finance capitalism, through their trustees and investments. In 1971, the Ford Foundation established the Commonfund for managing the investments of private universities, schools, and foundations. Its charge was to break away from the traditional conservative investment policies of these entities in order to produce more robust returns.
As a consequence, the largest foundations became “powerhouses” in investing, seeking to increase their yields through hedge funds, distressed debt, venture capital, buyouts, real estate, and international resource and energy ventures. The investment committee of the Ford Foundation’s board is headed by Afsaneh Beschloss, who was recruited from the Carlyle Group where she was a specialist in hedge funds. According to Commonfund’s report, about 40% of foundations screen their investments; however, the major evil avoided is tobacco.
While critical scrutiny of foundations is rare, it is almost entirely absent from major media. A notable exception was Charles Piller’s 2007 investigation of Gates Foundation investments (published in The Los Angeles Times) that concluded: “The Gates Foundation reaps vast profits every year from companies whose actions contradict its mission of improving society in the United States and around the world, particularly the lot of people afflicted by poverty and disease.”
Foundations are quick to publicize their “cause-related” investments, but for the bulk of their portfolios they go along with the crowd, and that has made all the sameness.
Paul Joseph Watson & Kurt Nimmo Prison Planet.com
Monday, June 1, 2009
The Obama administration’s new Cybersecurity system will only make the Internet more vulnerable to attack, while creating the framework for a massively upgraded government surveillance grid that will control and regulate every aspect of our daily lives through the implementation of “smart” technology.
Obama’s announcement of the new cybersecurity grid dovetails with a recently introduced Senate bill, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, that would hand the president the power to shut down the entire Internet in the event of a “cybersecurity” crisis.
“The bill’s draft states that “the president may order a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic” and would give the government ongoing access to “all relevant data concerning (critical infrastructure) networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access,” reports Raw Story.
The legislation would allow the government to tap into any digital aspect of every citizen’s information without a warrant. Banking, business and medical records would be wide open to inspection, as well as personal instant message and e mail communications.
This is President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program on steroids, yet the reaction from the liberal left has been muted to say the least.
Furthermore, the reasoning behind the proposal is a farce, since cybersecurity will make the Internet even more vulnerable to attack.
According to Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the program would “basically establish a path for the bad guys to skip down.”
One of the bill’s authors, Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, admitted that the bill was about more than just military or intelligence concerns. “It is a lot more than that. It suddenly gets into the realm of traffic lights and rail networks and water and electricity,” said Rockefeller.
Essentially, this is the framework within which every aspect of our lives will be managed and regulated by a gargantuan government bureaucracy designed to control and shape every aspect of our behavior through our dependence on technology.
Under the cybersecurity grid, our electricity consumption, our water consumption and every other basic utility that we rely upon will be subject to state regulation.
This is already being introduced through “smart” technology, manifesting in such things as fridges that are controlled by power companies and not the individual. If you are deemed to have bypassed government-approved levels of consumption, your fridge will be automatically turned off remotely.
“A domestic refrigerator that can be turned on and off by the electricity supplier without the homeowner being aware is to go on trial,” reported the Daily Mail in January. “Npower will distribute 300 ‘smart fridges’ free to homeowners throughout Britain within the next five weeks as part of the energy companies’ efforts to tackle climate change.”
“At times of high demand, the National Grid will activate the switches in the fridges to achieve a balance in the power supply. The development means that, for the first time, consumers will lose control over the use of electricity in their own homes,” stated the report.
All British homes are also set to have “smart” electricity and gas meters installed by law by 2020. The meters would “record energy use” according to a Reuters report.
Likewise, water companies are preparing to force homeowners to install water meters so that water consumption can be accurately recorded and restricted in times of drought.
This is just the beginning of the imposition of a suffocating prison planet whereby our every action will not only be recorded by big brother but also subject to government approval and control.
The Cybersecurity grid will also be an upgrade of the pervasive snoop network that has already been operating under NSA auspices for decades.
During a speech last week on “cybersecurity,” Obama told a whopper. He said the government’s effort to protect us from cyber bad guys “will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic. We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans.”
Is it possible Obama has never heard of Mark Klein, the retired AT&T communications technician who said years ago that the company shunted all Internet traffic — including traffic from peering links connecting to other Internet backbone providers — to semantic traffic analyzers, installed in a secret room inside the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco? There are similar rooms in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego, all sucking up internet data.
Klein explained that the multinational corporation is doing this at the behest of the NSA. It is “vacuum-cleaner surveillance” approach that grabs everything. “Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of [the Bush] administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act],” said Klein in 2006.
After the NSA showed up in 2002 at AT&T’s Folsom Street facility, Klein began connecting the dots. “You might recall there was a big blowup in the news about the Total Information Awareness [TIA] program, led by Adm. [John] Poindexter, which caused the big upsetness in Congress, because what Poindexter was proposing to do was draw in databases from everywhere — and this was in The New York Times — draw in Internet data, bank records, travel records, everything into one big conglomeration which could be searchable by the government so they could find out everything about what anybody’s doing at any time of day,” Klein told PBS. “And all this would be done without any warrants. This is how it was presented by Poindexter himself in The New York Times, and that caused a great upset, brouhaha, in Congress.”
On January 16, 2003, Senator Russ Feingold introduced legislation to suspend the activity of the Total Information Awareness program pending a Congressional review of privacy issues involved. In February 2003, Congress passed legislation suspending activities of the IAO (Information Awareness Office) pending a Congressional report of the office’s activities.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Congress acted after William Safire published an article in the New York Times claiming “[TIA] has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans” (see You Are a Suspect, November 14, 2002).
Of course, the program didn’t go away. Legislators included a classified annex to the Defense Appropriations Act that preserved funding for TIA’s component technologies, if they were transferred to other government agencies. TIA projects continued to be funded under classified annexes to Defense and Intelligence appropriation bills.
“Total Information Awareness — the all-seeing terrorist spotting algorithm-meets-the-mother-of-all-databases that was ostensibly de-funded by Congress in 2003, never actually died, and was largely rebuilt in secret by the NSA, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman,” Ryan Singel wrote for Wired on March 10, 2008. “There’s been no real debate in Congress or in the press about whether the government should be allowed to track every Americans phone calls, emails and web browsing.”
Jon Stokes, writing for Ars Technica, notes that TIA technology is nothing new. “TIA-like efforts are still going on” Stokes wrote in 2005, and “the government has been trying to use new technology, like database tech and voice recognition, for domestic surveillance for a long time. And when I say a long time, I mean well before the current administration came into office.” It really got a boost under Clinton in 1995 when the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) was passed. “CALEA mandated that the telcos aid wiretapping by installing remote wiretap ports onto their digital switches so that the switch traffic would be available for snooping by law enforcement.” In other words, Mark Klein had but scratched the surface.
Truman created the NSA in 1952, supposedly to serve as “America’s ears” abroad, but the agency has long served as a secret Stasi-like organization dedicated to snooping on Americans. The NSA, writes Siobhan Gorman for the Wall Street Journal, “and other intelligence agencies were found to be using their spy tools to monitor Americans for political purposes.”
The NSA’s predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency, launched Project SHAMROCK in 1945. It obtained copies of all telegraphic information exiting or entering the United States with the full cooperation of RCA, ITT and Western Union. A sister project known as Project MINARET involved the creation of “watch lists,” by each of the intelligence agencies and the FBI, of those accused of “subversive” domestic activities. The watch lists included such notables as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez and Dr. Benjamin Spock, according to Patrick S. Poole, writing for Nexus Magazine in 1999. The FBI, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies were actively involved in creating the watch lists.
NSA has attempted to keep up on technology as the secretive agency continues to snoop on “subversives” and others the government considers miscreants. In February, trade publications reported the agency is offering “billions” to any firm able to offer reliable eavesdropping on Skype IM and voice traffic. Skype is particularity troublesome because it utilizes P2P networks, that is to say peer-top-peer (no central server owned and operated by a telecom required). The government and the corporate media may tell you they want to crack down on P2P — for instance, the vastly popular BitTorrent — because of copyright infringement, but a more practical reason is because the government has yet to figure out how to crack the file sharing protocol. Skype and BitTorrent account for a large amount of traffic on the internet.
If you think Obama will roll back the government’s massive and unconstitutional snoop program, think again. On April 3, the Obama Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s landmark lawsuits against illegal spying by the NSA. The DOJ demanded that the entire lawsuit be dismissed based on both the Bush administration’s claim that a “state secrets” privilege bars any lawsuits against the executive branch for illegal spying, as well as a novel “sovereign immunity” claim that the Patriot Act bars lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance (see the EFF press release, Obama Administration Embraces Bush Position on Warrantless Wiretapping and Secrecy).
In March, Obama’s coordinator for cybersecurity programs, Rod Beckstrom, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur, quit because he opposed the role of the NSA in the so-called cybersecurity initiative. Beckstrom said “the threats to our democratic processes are significant if all top level government network security and monitoring are handled by” the NSA.
“Obama’s moves drew praise from key lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who vowed to work with the president to implement new security measures as needed,” CQPolitics reported shortly after his “cybersecurity” speech. “Obama said his cybersecurity adviser — who will be a member of both the National Security Staff and the National Economic Council staff — will head a new office within the White House.”
“We applaud President Obama for highlighting the extraordinarily serious issue of cybersecurity,” Sens. Johns D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.V., and Olympia J. Snowe , R-Maine, said in a joint statement. “No other president in American history has elevated this issue to that level and we think him for his leadership.”
No other president so far has had the power to shut down the internet. The Rockefeller-Snowe bill, S 778, would grant Obama dictatorial power declare a so-called “cyber emergency” and pull the plug, or at least cripple networks deemed a threat. The U.S. government is not seriously worried about Chinese hackers or mischievous kids in Latvia (as Rockefeller cited as a danger) but rather fear free and unfettered speech and activism on the part of its own citizens.
Obama’s promise is merely an effort to string you along with a big fat lie. He has absolutely no respect for you or the Bill of Rights.
With four days to go before we can take part in the second largest “democratic” election in the world (after India’s), it is not just the diversion of the scandals engulfing our own Parliament which has driven voting for the EU’s version further than ever off the radar.
At least, last time the flurry of excitement over Kilroy-Silk and Joan Collins – resulting in the UK Independence Party winning 12 seats – temporarily halted that steady collapse in turnout which in 1999 saw only 23 per cent of the electorate bothering to vote. The trouble with the European Parliament, as we know, is that none of us really know how to relate to it, or what connection this remote, mysterious body has with our lives. Probably not more than one in a thousand could name more than a couple of the MEPs we sent there last time. The farcical “list system”, based on dividing Britain up into 12 vast “Euro-regions”, means we probably didn’t even know the names of the mediocrities we voted for.
PortalScape 