The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
With Journalism Persecuted, The United States Is Now At Event Horizon To A Police State
Repression: Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who published Edward Snowden’s leaks, was recently suggested to be a criminal for shining light on the NSA’s abuse of power. This is a key identifiable step when societies close down; it is a point of no return. It seems the United States is reaching the event horizon to a police state.
The times, as Bob Dylan wrote, “are a`changin.” Conspiracy theories about journalist Michale Hastings' death – or murder – now have now been pumped out via “mainstream” vehicles, such as Huff Post, without it being just another exercise for bashing conspiracy theories with ridicule and rejection under the at-times hallucinatory influence of maximum prejudice and minimal knowledge. Maybe this change is due to mainstream media finding itself unable to continue freezing out serious consideration of conspiracies because of what someone wrote on this blog called the difficulty of distinguishing reality from conspiracy theories anymore. In this case though, they play it pretty safe by getting a mainstream media darling such as Richard Clarke to do the most of the talking:
The Strange Case of Barrett Brown
Amid the outrage over the NSA's spying program, the jailing of journalist Barrett Brown points to a deeper and very troubling problem.
The Nation, 18 June 2013
In early 2010, journalist and satirist Barrett Brown was working on a book on political pundits, when the hacktivist collective Anonymous caught his attention. He soon began writing about its activities and potential. In a defense of the group’s anti-censorship operations in Australia published on February 10, Brown declared, “I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and under-reported social developments to have occurred in decades, and that the development in question promises to threaten the institution of the nation-state and perhaps even someday replace it as the world’s most fundamental and relevant method of human organization.”
By then, Brown was already considered by his fans to be the Hunter S. Thompson of his generation. In point of fact he wasn’t like Hunter S. Thompson, but was more of a throwback—a sharp-witted, irreverent journalist and satirist in the mold of Ambrose Bierce or Dorothy Parker. His acid tongue was on display in his co-authored 2007 book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny, in which he declared: “This will not be a polite book. Politeness is wasted on the dishonest, who will always take advantage of any well-intended concession.”
But it wasn’t Brown’s acid tongue so much as his love of minutiae (and ability to organize and explain minutiae) that would ultimately land him in trouble. Abandoning his book on pundits in favor of a book on Anonymous, he could not have known that delving into the territory of hackers and leaks would ultimately lead to his facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. In light of the bombshell revelations published by Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman about government and corporate spying, Brown’s case is a good—and underreported—reminder of the considerable risk faced by reporters who report on leaks.
Full article below the line.
Five Myths About The National Security Agency
By James Bamford
Washingtonpost.com, June 21, 2013
When the National Security Agency was created through a top-secret memorandum signed by President Harry Truman in 1952, the agency was so secret that only a few members of Congress knew about it. While the NSA gradually became known over the decades, its inner workings remain extremely hidden, even with the recent leaks about its gathering of Americans' phone records and tapping into data from the nine largest Internet companies. Let's pull back the shroud a bit to demystify this agency.
Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Jim Bamford on Five Myths About NSA”
When something is very dangerous, like nuclear weapons, standard forms of protections and control methodologies aren't sufficient.
Something that potentially dangerous needs something more aggressive.
In the military, that's called positive control.
Positive control is an active form of control where the dangerous item is under 24x7x365 monitoring, checking, patrolling, testing, etc.
In this type of system, no information = danger. Alarm bells sound when the feeds and system checks monitoring the item go dark.
This is the opposite of the type of security and law enforcement we're used to in our daily lives. These systems are best described as negative control systems.
Negative control systems are focused on detecting exceptions. A crime. Good behavior is expected. As a result, this system only takes action when a failure occurs.
Positive security and People
Positive security can apply to people too, if they are dangerous enough.
By Charley Bowman
In mid-June, 2013, Western New York Peace Center board member Valerie Niederhoffer was stopped and interrogated for several hours at the U.S.-Canadian border when returning to the US from an afternoon doing Tai Chi in Canada with friendsi.
The U.S. immigration and customs officer entered Val's name into his computer system and discovered Val had an Order of Protection. He then asked her to pull over for an extended interview.
Orders of Protection (restraining orders) are generally given for spousal abuse, but this unique Order of Protection has been given to activists who have been arrested for challenging the U.S. assassin drone policies.
This is why the appointment of Supreme Court Justices matters so much. We now have a court which routinely favors corporations over individuals. Here is their latest decision, part of the Legalization Trend. Increasingly monopolistic practices that would previously have been illegal, are now the law of the land. We are becoming a country wh! ere corporate influence makes illegal things legal so that vassal politicians, and corporations can say, “They/we broke no laws. Everything they/we are doing is perfectly legal.”
In Major Blow To Consumers, Supreme Court Protects Mega-Corporations From Liability
NICOLE FLATOW – Think Progress
