The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Explosion a reminder of NYC's aging infrastructure
By DAVID CRARY
AP National Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Even while the cause remains unknown, a deadly blast that leveled two buildings served by a 127-year-old gas main has provided a jarring reminder of just how old and vulnerable much of the infrastructure is in New York and many other cities nationwide.
A Short Guide to the Internet’s Biggest Enemies
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its annual “Enemies of the Internet” index this week—a ranking first launched in 2006 intended to track countries that repress online speech, intimidate and arrest bloggers, and conduct surveillance of their citizens. Some countries have been mainstays on the annual index, while others have been able to work their way off the list. Two countries particularly deserving of praise in this area are Tunisia and Myanmar (Burma), both of which have stopped censoring the Internet in recent years and are headed in the right direction toward Internet freedom.
In the former category are some of the world’s worst offenders: Cuba, North Korea, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Belarus, Bahrain, Turkmenistan, Syria. Nearly every one of these countries has amped up their online repression in recent years, from implementing sophisticated surveillance (Syria) to utilizing targeted surveillance tools (Vietnam) to increasing crackdowns on online speech (Saudi Arabia). These are countries where, despite advocacy efforts by local and international groups, no progress has been made.
UPDATE 16 Mar 14: Was Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Redirected to Diego Garcia?
and also
UPDATE 15 Mar 14: Malaysia Airline MH370: 9/11-style terror allegations resurface in case of lost plane
UPDATE 14 Mar 14: CONFIRMED: Flight 370 Cyberjacked to secret base in Indian ocean – American or Chinese?
The story gets weirder and weirder as one looks at it. Goes beyond what is noted below in talking extensively about an AWACs jet hijack of 370, involvement of Israel and other things. Don't have the time to untangle this all, but the picture is becoming less cloudy and coming back full-circle in its reference to Israel and Iran in this AWACs-hijack context, and Israeli involvement was what I pointed out in my very first post on this subject.
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2014/03/case-closed-hijacked-by-awacs-2916516.html
From http://www.jimstonefreelance.com [allegedly shut down]
Malaysian airlines flight 377 has been provably hijacked by an AWACS plane. This is outlined in the updates below.
Was a Harry Potter-Like Electronic “Cloak of Invisibility” Used on Flight 370 by Freescale Semiconductor Contractors?
It is conceivable that the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 plane is “cloaked,” hiding with hi-tech electronic warfare weaponry that exists and is used,’ Beforeitsnews.com wrote. ‘In fact, this type of technology is precisely the expertise of Freescale that has 20 employees on board the missing flight.’ ‘These were people with a lot of experience and technical background and they were very important people,’ Mr Mitch Haws, Global communications officer for the tech company, said. The company recently launched a major initiative dedicated to serving radio frequency power needs of U.S. aerospace and defence sector.”
America's $1 Trillion National Security Budget
by Winslow T. Wheeler
March 13, 2014
The Pentagon's current leadership and most on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in Congress describe President Obama's 2015 defense budget request as painfully austere, if not dangerously inadequate. The defense trade press is full of statements from generals, admirals and the other politicians from both political parties that there is not nearly enough money available to buy adequate amounts of new hardware, maintain current pay and benefits or provide even low amounts of training and equipment maintenance. As a result, they are looking for ways to relieve the Pentagon from its penury.
Scarcity of money is not their problem. Pentagon costs, taken together with other known national security expenses for 2015, will exceed $1 Trillion. How can that be? The trade press is full of statements about the Pentagon's $495.6 billion budget and how low that is.
There is much more than $495.6 billion in the budget for the Pentagon, and there are piles of national security spending outside the Pentagon-all of it as elemental for national security as any new aircraft and ships and the morale and well-being of our troops.
The table below details what a careful observer will find in President Obama's 2015 budget presentation materials. The amounts for the Pentagon are well above the advertised $495.6 billion, and there are several non-Pentagon accounts that are clearly relevant.
Snowden was not alone: CIA faction behind leak of NSA document trove
February 15-17, 2014
Sources within the U.S. intelligence community have told WMR, on the condition of anonymity, that National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden gained access to and released tens of thousands of classified NSA documents because a faction within the Central Intelligence Agency was growing increasingly alarmed over the massive surveillance system controlled by NSA. In many cases, highly compartmented CIA covert operations abroad were made known to NSA because of the ability of the signals intelligence and cyber warfare agency to monitor full spectrum digital communications worldwide, including those of the CIA.
A group of active and retired CIA officers, in addition to CIA contractors, set out to expose the NSA's massive surveillance operations, as well as those of its foreign partners. Snowden, a former CIA employee who worked for the joint NSA-CIA Special Collection Service in Geneva, Switzerland as an official cover CIA employee attached to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and in Misawa, Japan under non-official cover with Dell Computer and Booz Allen Hamilton, was chosen by the CIA faction as the person best positioned to collect NSA documents and leak them to the media.
Continue reading “Wayne Madsen: Snowden Had Help — CIA vs NSA Story Gains Traction”
Europarl Suspends U.S. Trade Talks, Data Sharing Over Mass Surveillance
Privacy: The European Parliament has just voted on a comprehensive bill to express its massive disapproval of U.S. mass spying on ordinary citizens. In the bill, it calls for suspension of trade talks, suspension of data sharing, suspension of U.S. corporate rights to European data, and calls for the general principle of only surveilling suspects to be honored. This follows a several-months-long continuous inquiry into United States spying practices.
