Does the US Intelligence Community have NSA-sourced leverage that allows it to avoid — to refuse — being sequestered? Is there a shadow government? These are questions asked on this program. Is Dick Cheney still in charge? What's different? “The Orwellian scale.” “Post office taking a photo of every envelope.”
Josh Kilborne: 80% of US Adults Near Poverty, Relying on Welfare, or Are Unemployed?
07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Corruption, Government80% Of US Adults Are Near Poverty, Rely On Welfare, Or Are Unemployed
Despite consumer confidence at a six-year high, the latest AP survey of the real America shows a stunning four out of five U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, are near poverty, or rely on welfare for at least parts of their lives amid signs of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream. Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among whites about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987.
“Poverty is no longer an issue of ‘them', it's an issue of ‘us',” as ‘the invisible poor' – lower income whites – are generally dispersed in suburbs (Appalachia, the industrial Midwest, and across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains) where more than 60% of the poor are white.
More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four – accounting for more than 41% of the nation's destitute – nearly double the number of poor blacks and as one survey respondent noted “I think it's going to get worse.”
Stephen E. Arnold: NSA Youth Outreach Program
Ethics, Government, MilitaryNSA Youth Outreach
In the swirl of information about the NSA, some interesting chunks of data get lost. I am not referencing the fascinating assertion that the NSA cannot search its own emails. (You can find the details of this possibly inaccurate but quite amusing story at http://goo.gl/2Lx0hs.
Like Fish & Wildlife, the NSA has a youth communication program in place. One of the facets of this initiative is called Change the World. The subsite of NSA.gov (http://www.nsa.gov/change/
The most interesting item on the NSA subsite offers:
Be a savvy social networker! First thing for any savvy social networker is to access your own privacy and security settings so that only people you know can access your social networking site. If you are involved in social gaming with people you don’t know, stay in control and stay comfortable. Stay in disguise and if you suspect someone is “gaming” you or asking too many personal questions, tell your parents or a trusted adult. Keep track of what the person is saying, but do not communicate or send chats to them. Do you download “cheat” programs that promise information to how to perform better or beat a game? Sometimes cheat downloads are used to implant a virus or malware on your computer!
The footer to the Web page contains the standard NSA tag and a 2009 date stamp.
Stephen E Arnold, July 29, 2013
You can sign up for a free monthly newsletter about online and content processing at http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/
Chuck Spinney: Sick People at Aspin Summit II
07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption, Government, IdiocyFYI … some of this attached NYT report seems to have been sourced in part on the “meeting at the Aspen Inst., reported by Max Blumenthal in Alternet (See “Shocking ‘Extermination' Fantasies By the People Running America's Empire on Full Display at Aspen Summit”), which I distributed earlier this week.
Note how the information in this NYT report is consistent with a need for even greater surveillance of John Q Average American. This helps to prop up the establishment’s panicky pushback against the growing populist threat to rein in NSA’s snooping that became so evident in the surprisingly narrow defeat of the Amash Amendment — a panic which Blumenthal noted was also on display in the Snowden angst pervading Aspen.
Now think of the unstated elegance implicit in the closed loop of the snooping mentality on display in these two reports: The US and its European establishments (and the Sunni Gulf Monarchies) stoke up a sectarian revolt against Syrian President Assad. Predictably, the best fighters in the revolt are radical Sunni Jihadis, many of whom were trained by our wars in Iraq and Libya and perhaps Afghanistan. Also predictably, given Jihadi spillover from Libya, the radical Jihadis take over the Syrian revolt. The US and Europeans now claim these Syrian Jihadis are attracting Jihadi wannabees from the West (also predictable), who may return to the Europe and US, where they can use their enhanced terrorist skills and Al Qaida connections to wreak havoc at home. Therefore, given the new domestic threat created by the Establishment's policies of perpetual war, we need to increase NSA surveillance (really data mining) capabilities to sniff out indicators of prospective terrorist behaviour at home. Naturally, to do this, we must accept the greatly increased risks of false positives* implicit in all data mining schemes, because they all rely on the mechanistic assumption that the targets of the mining action will not bother to modify their behaviour sufficiently to neutralize their identification by the data mining algorithm or template. (A rather peculiar assumption given the proactive conspiratorial confrontation dynamics so pervasive throughout the Middle East.)
Of course, these legal niceties of avoiding false positives are irrelevant, because thanks to the Patriot (Enabling?) Act, we can detain targets without charging them, and besides, the real threats to be neutralized are the outliers at home who are trying to defend and anachronistic Fourth Amendment like Congressmen Amash and Conyers. So, a few more false positives of innocent John Q. Average Americans are merely collateral damage that must be accepted in the defense of ‘freedom' in the perpetual wars of American Empire.
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* A false positive occurs when a statistical deduction tells you something is true when it is in reality not true. Finding an innocent man guilty of a crime is a false positive, and it is no accident that most legal systems in democracies are premised, at least in theory, on a value system that it is more important to avoid false positives and than false negatives (i.e. it is more important not to convict and innocent person than to fail to convict a guilty person)
Worries Mount as Syria Lures West’s Muslims
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times, July 27, 2013
WASHINGTON — A rising number of radicalized young Muslims with Western passports are traveling to Syria to fight with the rebels against the government of Bashar al-Assad, raising fears among American and European intelligence officials of a new terrorist threat when the fighters return home.
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Sick People at Aspin Summit II”
SchwartzReport: Bad Bees, Ugly Death of Full-Time Jobs, Worse Who We At War With? Classified! End of America: Federal Order for Password Files
Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Law EnforcementBAD:
Here is the latest on the plight of the bees. The headline says it all.
Scientists Discover What’s Killing the Bees and It’s Worse Than You Thought
TODD WOODY – Quartz
UGLY:
The income of the average American family is nine per cent lower than it was a decade ago, and it gets harder and harder to get a job. And now this survey showing that young adults, even when they have some work, are working full-time jobs less and less.
In U.S., Fewer Young Adults Holding Full-Time Jobs in 2013 |
DENNIS JACOBE, Chief Economist – The Gallup Organization |
WORSE:
We have reached the Orwellian state of continuous war. Who are we fighting? That's a secret. You are required to pay for it, but you are not entitled to know.
Who Are We at War With? That’s Classified
CORA CURRIER – ProPublica
END OF AMERICA:
Here is the latest on the American police state. If you think anything you do is private you live in a fantasy.
Feds Tell Web Firms to Turn Over User Account Passwords
DECLAN MCCULLAGH, Chief Political Correspondent – C|NET
Gordon Duff: Israeli Covert Action in USA Led by Senator John McCain?
Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, MilitaryIsraeli hoax on Gen. Dempsey unmasked
Hoax exposed: Gen. Dempsey rebuffs speculations he called for Syria raids
“In truth, the calls for ‘kinetic strikes’ on Syria came from Senator John McCain of Arizona, a member of the Israeli lobby who met with Al Qaeda leaders in the Arab country in late May, 2013.”
Continue reading “Gordon Duff: Israeli Covert Action in USA Led by Senator John McCain?”
Marcus Aurelius: Eric Holder Says Snowden Will Not Face the Death Penalty
Ethics, GovernmentIMHO, bad call by the AG. What Snowden did could very easily cause US deaths if not immediately then sometime down the road. I see no fundamental difference between him and Julius and Ethel Rosenburg, the two WWII traitors who compromised the atomic bomb to the Soviets and were later tried, convicted, and executed. How would the AG conceivably explain guaranteeing Snowden's life to the loved ones of some future casualty of his treachery? A lot of people have spent a lot of their lives, and some have lost their lives, protecting classified information. This makes a mockery of all that.)