Month: March 2012

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Mini-Me: Doubling Down on 9/11

Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Military
Who? Mini-Me?

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Doubling down on 9/11

A decade after the attacks, our national security regime continues to grow ever more punitive and secretive

Karen Greenberg

Salon.com, 19 March 2012

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

By now, you’d think we’d be entering the end of the 9/11 era. One war over in the Greater Middle East, another hurtling disastrously to its end, and the threat of al-Qaida so diminished that it should hardly move the needle on the national worry meter. You might think, in fact, that the moment had arrived to turn the American gaze back to first principles: the Constitution and its protections of rights and liberties.

Yet warning signs abound that 2012 will be another year in which, in the name of national security, those rights and liberties are only further Guantanamo-ized and abridged. Most notably, for example, despite the fact that genuinely dangerous enemies continue to exist abroad, there is now a new enemy in our sights: namely, American oppositional types and whistleblowers who are charged as little short of traitors for revealing the workings of our government to journalists and others.

Here and elsewhere, it looks like we can expect the Obama administration to continue to barrel down the path that has already taken us far from the country we used to be. And by next year, if a different president is in the Oval Office, expect him to lead us even further astray. With that in mind, here are five categories in the sphere of national security where 2012 is likely to prove even grimmer than 2011.

1. Ever More Punitive (Ever Less Fair-minded).

2. Ever More Legal Limbo (Ever Less Confidence in the Constitution).  

3. Ever More Secrecy (Ever Less Transparency)

4. Ever More Distrust (Ever Less Privacy)

5. Ever More Killing (Ever Less Peace)

Karen J. Greenberg is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School and author of “The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days.”More Karen Greenberg

Read full article  with much detail and additional links for each of the five points.

Phi Beta Iota:  An intelligent article replete with integrity.

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Berto Jongman: 50 Mostly Free Social Media Tools for 2012

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence
Berto Jongman

50 (mostly) free social media tools you can’t live without in 2012

18th March 2012 by

A couple years ago, Jay Baer wrote a great blog post called ‘The 39 social media tools I’ll use today’ which was an all-in-one toolkit for social media marketers (and still is).

A lot has changed in the two years since that post was published so here is a ’2012 remix’ featuring 50 (mostly free) tools you can use on a daily basis.

Whether you are just starting out in the social media arena or have been at it for a few years, this will hopefully be a handy resource. So, let’s serve ‘em up!

Listening / Research

The foundations for any social media marketing activity start with listening and in-depth research, ranging from influencer identification to campaign planning.

General listening tools

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: 50 Mostly Free Social Media Tools for 2012”

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Independent Voter Network: Electoral Reform Series

Uncategorized
Robert David STEELE Vivas

Independent Voter Network (IVN)

Steele on Electoral Reform: Introduction of a New Series

I have been invited to post a series of short commentaries on the Electoral Reform Act of 2012, a crowd-sourced outline that started in 2000 and was first developed over time by myself with Jim Turner (former #2 to Ralph Nader), Michael Cudahey (former top aid to Barry Goldwater), and Jock Gill (former communications specialist for Bill Clinton).

When Occupy came to my attention on 17 September 2012, I immediately took notice and quickly noticed that Electoral Reform was a key element of the US Day of Rage web page [neither about rage, nor lasting a day].  I spoke about this to Russia Today TV, that got me a call from a US Day of Rage person, and that led to my briefing the Occupy NYC Electoral Reform Working Group in October, driving my trusty 1964 MGB with Soccer Mom letters (photo below, parked in front of the 60 Wall Street atrium used for meetings).

A video was made of me by someone else, speaking for six minutes, and then posted a couple of weeks later to YouTube.  It made the front page of Reddit, and went small viral (30,000 main votes, at least a dozen copies).

That in turn — and this is the important part — caused a number of stakeholders in electoral reform to get in touch with me, and led to the crowd-sourcing of the Electoral Reform Act of 2012.  Now at version 4.4, it started as 2.0.  Below are the existing links at We the People Reform Coalition, where I have tried to create a “package” that could be used to mobilize a third-wave campaign–trans-partisan in nature–to trash the two-party tyranny in 2012.

ELECTORAL REFORM

A DOCUMENTS
….1 International Election Integrity Principles
….2 Occupy NYC Working Group on Electoral Reform
….3 Election Integrity Pledge
….4 Electoral Reform Statement of Demand
B STRATEGY, METHODS, ORGANIZATIONS
….1 Richard Winger on Electoral Reform Short-Cut
….2 Campaign Finance: Amendment or Law?
….3 Americans Elect: Manchurian Fraud or Redeemable Good Idea?
….4 General Strike
….5 Directory of Activist Individuals & Organizations (USA)

Learn More

My individual discussions of each of the eleven elements are not at the above links, they will be unique to Independent Voter Network (IVN), less one consolidated document posted at BigBatUSA after all of the pieces have been posted.

Robert Steele is a former spy, honorary hacker, #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, a former small business CEO, and founder of Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 committed to creating public intelligence in the public interest. This is the first part in an ongoing multi-part series “Robert Steele on Electoral Reform”. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of IVN or IVN partners.

NOTE:  Comments are OPEN at IVN, use the links below.

Series:

Introduction of a New Series

Part 1: Process

Part 2: Ballot Access

Part 3: Voting for The People (Coming Soon)

Part 4: Voting for Issues (Coming Soon)

Part 5: Debates (Coming Soon)

Part 6: Cabinet (Coming Soon)

Part 7: Representation (Coming Soon)

Part 8: Districts (Coming Soon)

Part 9: Funding (Coming Soon)

Part 10: Legislation (Coming Soon)

Part 11: Constitutional Amendment (Coming Soon)

Part 12: The Stakeholders (Coming Soon)

Part 13: Overview of The Ethics (Coming Soon)

Part 14: Overview of The Action Plan (Coming Soon)

Part 15: The Pledge (Coming Soon)

Part 16: The Statement of Demand (Coming Soon)

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Mini-Me: The Future of Intelligence is Your Dishwasher?

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Marcus Aurelius:  The CIA wants to spy on you through your TV: Agency director says it will ‘transform' surveillance

  • Devices connected to internet leak information
  • CIA director says these gadgets will ‘transform clandestine tradecraft'
  • Spies could watch thousands via supercomputers
  • People ‘bug' their own homes with web-connected devices

DefDog:  CIA loves Internet of things… for spying on you

Petraeus says that the treasure trove of data connected appliances and devices will be able to gather on a “person of interest” will make it much easier to see what potential terrorists and others are doing inside home and to intercept communications. He also noted that connected household devices with the potential to be turned in the spy tools “change our notions of secrecy.” While the CIA has numerous regulations and laws preventing it from spying on American citizens, it’s apparently a much grayer area when it comes to collecting geolocation data that many devices
broadcast.

Dolphin: CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher

Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” Petraeus enthused, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”

CIA director David Petraeus (seen here playing Wii golf) is really excited about the idea behind the Internet of things. The thing is most excited about isn’t his refrigerator being able to order milk, but the effect that connected appliances and devices will have on “clandestine tradecraft.” In other words, he’s excited about being able to use these devices to spy on people.

Phi Beta Iota:  Patraeus was “musing” at an In-Q-Tel conference, so he can reasonably be forgiven for being taken out of context.  However, this is just one more stronger signal that the $80 billion a year US Intelligence Community, within which CIA provides armed drones, foreign liaison hand-outs, and very little else, is money wasted.   Clandestine tradecraft is about humans.  All-source analysis is about integrating a strategic analytic model with history and forecasting to deliver decision-support.  It is not about technology except in so far as it supports human cognition.  It's a pity the Director of the CIA has not learned that.  Technology is not a substitute for thinking, and administration is not a substitute for leadership.

See Also:

2012 PREPRINT FOR COMMENT: The Craft of Intelligence

Fixing WH and IC Steele 2009 1.5 PDF, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Spring 2010; As published; with corrected graphic (best).

2010 Human Intelligence (HUMINT): All Humans, All Minds, All the Time(US Army Strategic Studies Institute, June 2010

2009 Intelligence for the President–AND Everyone Else, as published in CounterPunch, Weekend Edition, February 27 – 1 March 2009

2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Restrospective

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Mini-Me: From JFK to 9/11 Spotlight Shines on the CIA

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, Articles & Chapters, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Launching the U.S. Terror War: the CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia1

Bush’s Terror War and the Fixing of Intelligence

On September 11, 2001, within hours of the murderous 9/11 attacks, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney had committed America to what they later called the “War on Terror.” It should more properly, I believe, be called the “Terror War,” one in which terror has been directed repeatedly against civilians by all participants, both states and non-state actors. It should also be seen as part of a larger, indeed global, process in which terror has been used against civilians in interrelated campaigns by all major powers, including China in Xinjiang and Russia in Chechnya, as well as the United States.2 Terror war in its global context should perhaps be seen as the latest stage of the age-long secular spread of transurban civilization into areas of mostly rural resistance  — areas where conventional forms of warfare, for either geographic or cultural reasons, prove inconclusive.

. . . . . .

In 2011 an important book by Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, demonstrated conclusively that the withholding was purposive, and sustained over a period of eighteen months.8 This interference and manipulation became particularly blatant and controversial in the days before 9/11; it led one FBI agent, Steve Bongardt, to predict accurately on August 29, less than two weeks before 9/11, that “someday someone will die.”9

Continue reading “Mini-Me: From JFK to 9/11 Spotlight Shines on the CIA”

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Josh Kilbourn: JP Morgan Whistleblower Being Ignored?

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption
Josh Kilbourn

The Crazy Things That One Whistleblower Says Are Happening At JP Morgan Will Blow Your Mind

The Economic Collapse Blog,18 March 2012

Rampant silver manipulation?  Rampant gold manipulation?  Rampant LIBOR manipulation?  Hiding MF Global client assets?  These are all happening at JP Morgan according to an open letter reportedly written by an anonymous employee of the firm.  The whistleblower also warns of a “cascading credit event being triggered” by derivatives related to Greek government debt.  Unlike Greg Smith at Goldman Sachs, this whistleblower has chosen to remain anonymous for now.  According to the letter, the whistleblower is still an employee of JP Morgan and has not resigned.  But that does make it much more difficult to confirm what he is saying.  With Greg Smith, we know exactly who he is and what he was doing at Goldman.  As far as this anonymous whistleblower is concerned, all we have is this letter.  So we must take it with a grain of salt.  However, the information in this letter does agree with what whistleblowers such as Andrew Maguirehave said in the past about silver manipulation by JP Morgan.  And this letter does mention Greg Smith's resignation from Goldman, so we know that it must have been written in the past few days.  Hopefully this letter will cause authorities to take a much closer look at the crazy things that are going on over at JP Morgan and the other big Wall Street banks.

This anonymous letter was addressed to the CFTC, but unfortunately it looks like the CFTC has already chosen to ignore it.

The original letter from this anonymous whistleblower has already been taken down from the CFTC website. When you go there now, all you get is this message….

“The Comment Cannot Be Found. Please Return to the Previous Page and Try Again.”

Fortunately, there are many in the alternative media that copied this entire letter from the CFTC website.

The following is a copy of the original letter that the anonymous whistleblower from JP Morgan submitted to the CFTC….

———-

Continue reading “Josh Kilbourn: JP Morgan Whistleblower Being Ignored?”