– US national security agencies increasingly use computerized analysis of collected data to designate a person as an enemy combatant.
– The US currently uses non-judicial Presidential “hit lists” to simplify the killing of people (including US citizens) designated as enemy combatants.
– The US is rapidly increasing its use of drones to kill enemy combatants nearly anywhere in the world 24x7x365.
The scary part is that the combination of these trends is the path of least resistance to an automated totalitarianism.
For those of you out of the loop on what is going on, it probably seemed to be a bit of a stretch. Particularly, the idea that the President could put American citizens on a military hit list without going through a judicial process.
If you were skeptical on the existence of a hit list, here's an article from today's (almost on cue) New York Times.
Two years after directing the Academy Award-winning documentary, “Inside Job,” filmmaker Charles Ferguson returns with a new book, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.” Ferguson explores why no top financial executives have been jailed for their role in the nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We also discuss Larry Summers and the revolving door between academia and Wall Street, as well as the key role Democrats have played in deregulating the financial industry. According to Ferguson, a “predatory elite” has “taken over significant portions of economic policy and of the political system, and also, unfortunately, major portions of the economics discipline.” Click here to see Part 2 of this interview. [includes rush transcript]
Phi Beta Iota: We strongly disagree on where the blame should be placed. The two-party tyranny, and corrupt Senators and Representatives, are the ones who have committed treason in betrayal of the public trust. Nothing Wall Street has done would have been possible without the combination of “control fraud” (failure of the Executive to enforce laws and regulations) and corruption (outright legalization of crime by corrupt Members in return for specified 5% bribes). There is nothing wrong with the United States of America that cannot be fixed, and fixed quickly, merely by flushing the two-party tyranny and all political incumbents (both executive and legislative), down the toilet. This is a state and local problem as well, not just a national problem.
This is the major press conference that AE911Truth held at the occasion of the World Premiere of their powerful myth-shattering documentary “9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out” on May 22, 2012 in Beverly Hills, CA. Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth founder, Richard Gage, AIA and AE911Truth supporter and actor, Ed Asner, teamed up to lay into the media in an effort to hold them accountable for their 10-year silence on the subject of the abundant scientific evidence and eyewitness testimony that pulls the rug from under the official story of the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11. This new documentary, introduced by Gage, following the press conference hosts 43 technical and building professionals who cite the evidence and call for a new investigation. It also includes 8 psychology professionals who are well versed in the difficult issues that viewers of this film may face when confronting the evidence.
Watch Video Below.
Phi Beta Iota: We are deeply sympathetic about the fact that most Americans, including well-educated Americans and especially well-educated Americans employed by the federal government, simply cannot comprehend this stuff. They live in a dream world, where America can do no wrong, government can be trusted, Dick Cheney deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and Barack Obama earned the one he got for his first ten days in office, etcetera etcetera. If the measure of a nation is the combination of public intelligence and public integrity, the USA is deeply mired in a cesspool of its own making.
Slush funds for the executive branch in authorization and appropriations bills are a big no-no, but if they are intended for Members and their staff to use, that would seem to be different.
The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) and the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee (sometimes called the HAC-D) have reported their separate defense bills to the House of Representatives (both bills purport to address both spending and policy). The House has already debated and passed the HASC’s “National Defense Authorization Act” (NDAA); it will soon debate the defense appropriations bill. Let’s check out what they’ve drafted and try to figure out which panel is the House’s reigning Pentagon pork king.
The press has covered both bills with multiple daily articles; the House debate, while truncated, got into all sorts of nuts and bolts, including amendments on labor practices in DOD contracting, military depot policy, and protection of sea otters in navy exercise areas, among many other things. In all, there were 141 amendments allowed for debate. That level of legislative and journalistic activity would suggest that the bill and its accompanying “committee report” were thoroughly scrubbed to make sure there were no slimy invertebrates hiding under rocks in the depths of the bill or its report.
Think no such thing.
The sea otters and other minutia addressed in amendments, for example, reflect the energy and thoroughness of lobbyists, not of congressional staff or others. Otherwise, some particularly odious elements of the HASC bill would hopefully have been challenged by one of the very few existing guardians of ethics and governance in the House. Had they or their staffs combed thoroughly through the bill and report they would have uncovered and, I hope, exposed that everlasting object of interest by Members of Congress: pork.
Two Ways the Chinese May Take Over the World and the US:
1) Chinese Stuxnet for the Rest of the World
If what this analyst says is true, it paints a truly astonishing in implication and very, very ugly picture of the national security situation in store for most governments – especially in the US:
Current issues. UK officials are fearful that China has the capability to shut down businesses, military and critical infrastructure through cyber attacks and spy equipment embedded in computer and telecommunications equipment. The Stuxnet worm is the most famous and best case example of a cyber attack on a network which wreaked devastation having easily compromised conventional software defensive systems. There have been many cases of computer hardware having backdoors, Trojans or other programs to allow an attacker to gain access or transmit confidential data to a third party. Considerable focus and expense has been invested in software computer networks and system defences to detect and eradicate such threats. However, similar technology with antivirus or anti Trojan capability for hardware (silicon chips) is not available. The computer or network hardware underpins and runs all the software defence systems. If the hardware has a vulnerability then all the energy in defending at the software level is redundant. An effort must be made to defend and detect at the hardware level for a more comprehensive strategy.
Our findings. Claims were made by the intelligence agencies around the world, from MI5, NSA and IARPA, that silicon chips could be infected. We developed breakthrough silicon chip scanning technology to investigate these claims.
We chose an American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard, manufactured in China. Our aim was to perform advanced code breaking and to see if there were any unexpected features on the chip.
We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time and found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key. This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems. The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure.
Last month, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced the creation of a new U.S. espionage agency: the Defense Clandestine Service, or DCS. DCS is expected to expand the Pentagon's espionage personnel by several hundred over the next few years, while reportedly leaving budgets largely unchanged. The news nonetheless surprised some observers in Washington because the move appeared, at least initially, to be a direct challenge to the Central Intelligence Agency, whose National Clandestine Service leads the country's spy work overseas. Then came a second surprise: former CIA officers and other intelligence experts started applauding. The question is why.
Government larceny and criminality just never ends, it seems to be increasing, especially against those who can least to afford to defend themselves against it:
The farmers, Randy Sowers and his wife Karen, made deposits totaling more than $295,000 from May 2011 to February 2012, but each transaction was less than $10,000. Now they are being accused of “structuring,” a violation of federal currency reporting requirements, as the feds are accusing them of deliberately depositing money in increments of less than $10,000 in an attempt to evade Currency Transaction Reporting requirements. The dairy farmer's “crime” stems from his weekly sales at local farmers' markets. The sales averaged about the same amount each week and, dutifully, the Sowers deposited them. They'd reportedly never even heard of the Bank Secrecy Act or “structuring,” but that was of no interest to the feds—the consistency of the amount the Sowers deposited, always less than $10,000, raised red flags to the feds, who claimed that this was indicative of a crime. The government promptly seized about $70,000 from the bank account, then issued a warrant for the seizures. The raid on the Sowers was conducted by an agency created in 2009 to go after money-laundering criminals. The agency started out with a bang by seizing $1.2 billion from a real money launderer, but it appears that what it's interested in now is making criminals out of small business persons, including small farmers.
But small business people are not the only targets of government and corporate predators. Poor people are too, as evidenced in this Mother Jones article:
