The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
US Consortium Forming on Industrial Internet
As many as ten companies including AT&T, Cisco Systems, GE, IBM, and Intel are working with US government representatives to form a consortium to drive the so-called Industrial Internet. Their goal is to define an architectural framework for open industry standards that would serve a broad swath of market sectors from automotive and manufacturing to healthcare and the military.
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The Washington Jerkocracy Strikes Again
Creating a Military-Industrial-Immigration Complex
How to turn the US-Mexican border into a war zone [profitable for the few]
Todd Miller
al Jazeera, 3 August 2013
The first thing I did at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix this March was climb the brown “explosion-resistant” tower, 10 metres high and 3 metres wide, directly in the centre of the spacious room that holds this annual trade show. From a platform where, assumedly, a border guard would stand, you could take in the constellation of small booths offering the surveillance industry's finest products, including a staggering multitude of ways to monitor, chase, capture, or even kill people, thanks to modernistic arrays of cameras and sensors, up-armored jeeps, the latest in guns, and even surveillance balloons.
Although at the time, headlines in the Southwest emphasised potential cuts to future border-security budgets thanks to Congress's “sequester”, the vast Phoenix Convention Center hall – where the defence and security industries strut their stuff for law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – told quite a different story. Clearly, the expanding global industry of border security wasn't about to go anywhere. It was as if the milling crowds of business people, government officials, and Border Patrol agents sensed that they were about to be truly in the money thanks to “immigration reform”, no matter what version of it did or didn't pass Congress. And it looks like they were absolutely right.
All around me in that tower were poster-sized fiery photos demonstrating ways it could help thwart massive attacks and fireball-style explosions. A border like the one just over 161 kilometres away between the United States and Mexico, it seemed to say, was not so much a place that divided people in situations of unprecedented global inequality, but a site of constant war-like danger.
Below me were booths as far as the eye could see surrounded by Disneyesque fake desert shrubbery, barbed wire, sand bags, and desert camouflage. Throw in the products on display and you could almost believe that you were wandering through a militarised border zone with a Hollywood flair.
To an awed potential customer, a salesman in a suit and tie demonstrated a mini-drone that fits in your hand like a Frisbee. It seemed to catch the technological fetishism that makes Expo the extravaganza it is. Later I asked him what such a drone would be used for. “To see what's over the next hill,” he replied.
I think this story is quite extraordinary, but not for the reasons given in the report. This year we will spend approximately $682.5 billion on the military budget and by the best unclassified estimates about $80 billion on the intelligence apparat. Hundreds of thousands of men and women work for these vast entities. Yet 19 young jihadists and about $500,000 created 9/11, and after over a! decade of expenditures, a few dozen jihadists still have the power to massively disrupt the U.S. There is something deeply wrong with this picture, and the current SR poll shows that over three-quarters of you feel less safe than you did 15 years ago. So what have we achieved, beyond making a small number of corporations obscenely rich, and killing and maiming a lot of people? One can only wonder if the choices made by first the Bush and, then, the Obama Administrations were the right ones. What would have happened, for instance, if instead of drones and war we had put our money into schools, libraries and hospitals in Islamic countries?
Embassy Closings Extended for a Week
ALI WATKINS, DAVID LIGHTMAN and ADAM BARON , Washington Bureau – McClatchy Newspapers
The police are out of control. These two “officers” should hang. This is what the criminally insane 9/11 DHS “lies for empire” and printed money mind-set have accomplished. The militarization of the police — intellectually and morally limited to begin with — has destroyed the social contract between the community and its so-called goverance forces.
Die for your country! Or they’ll do it for you!
95-year-old veteran John Wrana fought for America in World War 2, but he didn’t get a chance to die for his country. Instead, his country killed him with a beanbag shotgun blast to the stomach after a thorough tasering.
The incident began after Wrana, who uses a walker, refused a surgery at his assisted living home. He grew agitated at the staff for pressuring him for medical attention. He was a war hero and didn’t like being pushed around.
Soon the police arrived to subdue the senior citizen, riot gear at the ready to take on the wobbly old man. Conflicting reports have emerged between officers and staff, with the employees of the home reporting that they asked officers not to harm him and requested to intervene.
Police decided instead to taser the war hero and follow it up with a beanbag to the guts. Officers reported that a knife had been pulled, but no knife was found on the scene. The police used a riot shield, shotgun and taser on a 95-year-old man in a walker who arguably presented no threat to anyone but himself.
Who would have thought — tragic farce aka absurdist theater?
Other Agencies Clamor For Data N.S.A. Compiles
By Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt
New York Times, August 4, 2013 , Pg. 1
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency’s dominant role as the nation’s spy warehouse has spurred frequent tensions and turf fights with other federal intelligence agencies that want to use its surveillance tools for their own investigations, officials say.
Agencies working to curb drug trafficking, cyberattacks, money laundering, counterfeiting and even copyright infringement complain that their attempts to exploit the security agency’s vast resources have often been turned down because their own investigations are not considered a high enough priority, current and former government officials say.
Intelligence officials say they have been careful to limit the use of the security agency’s troves of data and eavesdropping spyware for fear they could be misused in ways that violate Americans’ privacy rights.
Intel community worried Obama administration disclosed too much about latest al Qaeda threat
Fear that sources and methods may have been compromised
By Lisa Ruth – The Washington Times Communities, Saturday, August 3, 2013
In warning about possible al Qaeda attacks against Americans overseas, U.S. officials may have provided too much detail about intercepted chatter and the source of the information, and that may make it more difficult to get such tips next time, former and current intelligence officials say.
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“Now? We are going to have to start all over again. We are operating blind,” he says.
