Idiocy – Page 102 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/06/112013/06/11

NIGHTWATCH: Pakistan to US/CIA – Stop the Drones or We Will + Drone Operator on Video – “I felt like a sociopath”

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War

Pakistan: In response to two US drone attacks since taking his oath of office last week, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif issued an official statement after his first cabinet meeting. “The policy of protesting against drone strikes for public consumption, while working behind the scenes to make them happen, is not on.”

He told the cabinet that drone attacks were a violation of national sovereignty and the government “had chalked out a policy” to counter them. He said it was a matter of concern that after he took charge of the government' drone attacks were launched which was not acceptable in any way

Comment: Over the weekend, the new government summoned the US Ambassador to deliver an official protest. The statements at the cabinet meeting signify that the new government will go beyond issuing pro forma protests. Sharif has a policy in mind and changes are likely.

Sharif also ordered a 30% cut in the staff of the Prime Minister to set an example for the rest of the cabinet whom he ordered to cut 30% of non-developmental expenditures. He told the cabinet to set priorities consistent with his guidance and report back to him in two weeks on how to revive the economy. He also advised that those who fail will be replaced.

Former drone operator says he's haunted by his part in more than 1,600 deaths

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH: Pakistan to US/CIA – Stop the Drones or We Will + Drone Operator on Video – “I felt like a sociopath””

2013/06/10

Doug Rushkoff on CNN: Edward Snowden is a hero — uncovering the MACHINE

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement, Military

Editor's note: Douglas Rushkoff writes a regular column for CNN.com. He is a media theorist and the author of the new book “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.”

(CNN) — When I was a kid, I remember a guy named Daniel Ellsberg leaking some classified documents to the New York Times about the Vietnam War called “the Pentagon Papers.”

When the whistle-blower finally stood trial for espionage, my parents weren't quite sure how to feel. But when Richard Nixon's crew was revealed to have been conducting illegal wiretaps in an effort to discredit the former intelligence contractor, well, they were outraged and decided Ellsberg was a hero. So did the judge and most of America.

I wonder whether Ed Snowden, the 29-year-old Booz Allen Hamilton employee behind last week's series of leaks about National Security Agency surveillance on the American public, will be rewarded with the same admiration. You'd think we would be even more outraged by what he uncovered than we were by the surveillance of Ellsberg. After all, it's not just one lone loose cannon being wiretapped here, it's all of us being monitored.

Douglas Rushkoff

Snowden has not uncovered a human conspiracy here but the workings of the machine itself. And it's a machine that really does require some human intervention.

Continue reading “Doug Rushkoff on CNN: Edward Snowden is a hero — uncovering the MACHINE”

2013/06/102013/06/10

Steven Aftergood: Secret Surveillance and the Crisis of Legitimacy

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

Secret Surveillance and the Crisis of Legitimacy

Intelligence, Leaks, Oversight, Secrecy

In December 1974, when a previous program of secret government surveillance was revealed by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times, the ensuing public uproar led directly to extensive congressional investigations and the creation of new mechanisms of oversight, including intelligence oversight committees in Congress and an intelligence surveillance court.

The public uproar over the latest disclosures of secret domestic surveillance by The Guardian and the Washington Post different cannot produce a precisely analogous result, because the oversight mechanisms intended to correct abuses already exist and indeed had signed off on the surveillance activities. Those programs are “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government,” President Obama said Friday. In some sense, the system functioned as intended.

Nevertheless, all three branches of government performed badly in this case, by misrepresenting the scope of official surveillance, misgauging public concern and evading public accountability.

Official Dissembling and Misrepresentation

Continue reading “Steven Aftergood: Secret Surveillance and the Crisis of Legitimacy”

2013/06/10

Mongoose: Prism the Bulk of President’s Daily Brief?

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Military

U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

Washington Post, 6 June 2013

VIDEO Barton Gellman on Source and Consequences

EXTRACT

Government officials and the document itself made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as PRISM’s most sensitive secret, fearing that the companies would withdraw from the program if exposed. “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources,” the briefing’s author wrote in his speaker’s notes.

An internal presentation of 41 briefing slides on PRISM, dated April 2013 and intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 items last year. According to the slides and other supporting materials obtained by The Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.

Continue reading “Mongoose: Prism the Bulk of President's Daily Brief?”

2013/06/092013/06/09

Jon Rappoport: NSA as Front for Two Israeli Companies, Narus and Verint, Specializing in Mass Surveillance & Getting Zionist Copy of Everything

08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military

NSA, the secret AT&T spy room, and 2 Israeli companies

Boom. Explosive revelations. The NSA is using telecom giants to spy on anybody and everybody, in a program called PRISM.

But the information is not new.

Three books have been written about the super-secret NSA, and James Bamford has written them all .

In 2008, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviewed Bamford as his latest book, The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, was being released.

Bamford explained that, in the 1990s, everything changed for NSA. Previously, they'd been able to intercept electronic communications by using big dishes to capture what was coming down to Earth from telecom satellites.

But with the shift to fiber-optic cables, NSA was shut out. So they devised new methods.

For example, they set up a secret spy room at an AT&T office in San Francisco. NSA installed new equipment that enabled them to tap into the fiber-optic cables and suck up all traffic.

How Bamford describes this, in 2008, tells you exactly where the PRISM program came from:

Continue reading “Jon Rappoport: NSA as Front for Two Israeli Companies, Narus and Verint, Specializing in Mass Surveillance & Getting Zionist Copy of Everything”

2013/06/082013/06/08

Eagle: Matt Taibbi on Bradley Manning Trial — Should Be About War Crimes By Others, Not Whistle-Blowing By One

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Military

300 Million Talons... — 300 Million Talons…

As Bradley Manning Trial Begins, Press Predictably Misses the Point

By Matt Taibbi

Rolling Stone: June 6, 2013

EXTRACT

You get the press and the rest of America following that bouncing ball, and the game's over. Almost no matter what the outcome of the trial is, if you can convince the American people that this case is about mental state of a single troubled kid from Crescent, Oklahoma, then the propaganda war has been won already.

Because in reality, this case does not have anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really, what his motives were. This case is entirely about the “classified” materials Manning had access to, and whether or not they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.

This whole thing, this trial, it all comes down to one simple equation. If you can be punished for making public a crime, then the government doing the punishing is itself criminal.

Continue reading “Eagle: Matt Taibbi on Bradley Manning Trial — Should Be About War Crimes By Others, Not Whistle-Blowing By One”

2013/06/082013/06/08