Category: Policies

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Journal: Consumer Group Calls for Hearings on Google Relations with NSA and CIA, Google’s Global Street-Level Survey of Wi-Fi Packet Interceptability

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Commerce, Computer/online security, Corruption, Cyberscams, malware, spam, Government, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Mobile

Group Calls for Hearings Into Google’s Ties to CIA and NSA

Prisonplanet.com
July 20, 2010

More information has emerged about Google’s relationship with the government and spook agencies (see PR Newswire below). The revelations should come as no surprise.

FULL STORY ONLINE

Consumer Watchdog, formerly the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is a nonprofit, nonpartisan consumer advocacy organization with offices in Washington, DC and Santa Monica, Ca.  Consumer Watchdog’s website is www.consumerwatchdog.org. Visit our new Google Privacy and Accountability Project website: http://insidegoogle.com.

Phi Beta Iota: Goggle has accomplished a great deal, aided in part by CIA and NSA, but also in part by being able to get away with stealing Yahoo's search engine in the early days and hiring the Alta Vista people when HP foolishly killed off that offering.  They have emulated Microsoft in achieving first-rate marketing with second-rate services, and continue to spend $10 million in fantasy cash for every dollar they actually earn.  They are now the Goldman Sachs of the software industry, and that is not a compliment.  It is not possible to understand Google without reading the three deep analytic books on Google by Stephen E. Arnold:

Book One: The Google Legacy–How Google's Internet Search is Transforming Application Software

Book Two:  Google Version 2.0–The Calculating Predator

Book Three:   Google: The Digital Gutenberg

All three books (all downloadable pdfs) are available in The Google Trilogy at a very special price.

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Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Water

00 Remixed Review Lists, 12 Water, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
Amazon Page

Six-Star and Beyond

Review: Governing Water–Contentious Transnational Politics and Global Institution Building (Global Environmental Accord–Strategies for Sustainability and Institutional Innovation)

Review: Blue Gold–The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water

Review: The Atlas of Water, Second Edition–Mapping the World’s Most Critical Resource

Five Star and Below

Review (DVD): Blue Gold–World Water Wars

Review: Environmental Security and Global Stability–Problems and Responses

Review: The Blue Covenant–The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water

Review: The Blue Death–Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Water”

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Journal: Netanyahu, Israel, Oslo, Playing US

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Government, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney Recommends

The attached very important report is by Jonathan Cook, a freelance resporter based in Nazareth in the occupied West Bank and one of the most intrepid reporters covering the Israel's occupation policies, is — or should be — a long overdue wakeup call to the US people, the US media, and the US government, but don't count on it.

Netanyahu admits on video he deceived US to destroy Oslo accord

Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent

The National,  July 18. 2010 1:02AM UAE

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100718/FOREIGN/707179891/1135

NAZARETH // There is one video Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, must be praying never gets posted on YouTube with English subtitles. To date, the 10-minute segment has been broadcast only in Hebrew on Israel’s Channel 10.

Its contents, however, threaten to gravely embarrass not only Mr Netanyahu but also the US administration of Barack Obama.

The film was shot, apparently without Mr Netanyahu’s knowledge, nine years ago, when the government of Ariel Sharon had started reinvading the main cities of the West Bank to crush Palestinian resistance in the early stages of the second intifada.

At the time Mr Netanyahu had taken a short break from politics but was soon to join Mr Sharon’s government as finance minister.

On a visit to a home in the settlement of Ofra in the West Bank to pay condolences to the family of a man killed in a Palestinian shooting attack, he makes a series of unguarded admissions about his first period as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999.

Seated on a sofa in the house, he tells the family that he deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords, the US-sponsored peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.

He dismisses the US as “easily moved to the right direction” and calls high levels of popular American support for Israel “absurd”.

FULL ARTICLE ONLINE

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Comment: NSA, Trailblazer, Thin Thread

10 Security, Budgets & Funding, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda

I noted on Phi Beta the piece on Dana Priest and your comment, which appears sadly right on the mark. You may want to check the 14 July article in the Post about former NSA senior Thomas Drake who is being indicted for spelling the beans on Trailblazer to the Baltimore Sun.

There is a lot of misinformation in the article about Project Thin Thread, an information management scheme that was virtually worthless, but had a number of defenders at the agency of which Drake was the most prominent. The author of the article also knows nothing about Trailblazer which was NOT a replacement for Thin Thread, but a much broader, if ill defined, modernization program.

This earlier article is relevant to the Priest series because as Trailblazer continued to founder NSA hired more and more contractors to try get the program on track. Both programs provide striking evidence of failures of technical leadership and incompetent project management which appear to endemic at NSA.

Incidentally several unnamed sources at the Fort contacted for article continue to argue that Trailblazer produced some worthwhile results. This is nonsense.

I served the Trailblazer program both as an NSA senior analyst and later as a contractor so observed the Trailblazer debacle from inside and outside.

SOURCE REDACTED

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Journal: USG as Theater–Very BAD Theater

03 Economy
Chuck Spinney Recommends

Tim Geithner’s Ninth Political Life

By Simon Johnson, Baseline Scenario, 16 July 2010

In modern American life, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner stands out as amazingly resilient and remarkably lucky – despite presiding over or being deeply involved in a series of political debacles, he has gone from strength to strength.  After at least eight improbably bounce backs, he might seem unassailable.  But his latest mistake – blocking Elizabeth Warren from the heading the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – may well prove politically fatal.

Geithner was a junior but key member of the US Treasury team that badly mishandled the early days of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and received widespread criticism (Life #1).  He was promoted as a result and thereafter enjoyed a meteoric rise.

As President of the New York Federal Reserve from 2003, and de facto head of the government’s financial intelligence service, he completely failed to spot the problems developing in and around the country’s financial markets; nothing about this embarrassing track record has since stood in his way (Life #2).  He subsequently became Hank Paulson’s Wall Street point person for one of the most comprehensively bungled bailouts of all time – the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, which in fall 2008 first appalled Congress with its intentions and then wasn’t used at all as advertised (Life #3).

FULL ARTICLE ONLINE

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Journal: The Fall of Obama–30 Years in the Making

03 Economy, 08 Wild Cards

CounterPunch Diary

The Fall of Obama

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Counterpunch

The man who seized the White House by fomenting a mood of irrational expectation is now facing the bitter price exacted by reality. The reality is that there can be no “good” American president. It’s an impossible hand to play. Obama is close to being finished.

The nation’s first black president promised change at the precise moment when no single man, even if endowed with the communicative powers of Franklin Roosevelt, the politic mastery of Lyndon Johnson, the brazen agility of Bill Clinton, could turn the tide that has been carrying America to disaster for 30 years.

This summer many Americans are frightened. Over 100,000 of them file for bankruptcy every month. Three million homeowners face foreclosure this year. Add them to the 2.8 million who were foreclosed in 2009, Obama’s first year in office. Nearly seven million have been without jobs in the last year for six months or longer. By the time you tot up the people who have given up looking for work and the people on part-time, the total is heading toward 20 million.

Fearful people are irrational. So are racists. Obama is the target of insane charges. A hefty percentage of Americans believe that he is a socialist – a charge as ludicrous as accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of being a closet Druid. Obama reveres the capitalist system. He admires the apex predators of Wall Street who showered his campaign treasury with millions of dollars. The frightful catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico stemmed directly from the green light he and his Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, gave to BP.

It is not Obama’s fault that for 30 years America’s policy – under Reagan, both Bushes and Bill Clinton – has been to export jobs permanently to the Third World. The jobs that Americans now desperately seek are no longer here, in the homeland, and never will be. They’re in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Indonesia.

FULL ARTICLE ONLINE

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Oil-Separating Centrifuges as Partial Relief for Gulf Oil Spill

03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, Commerce, Corporations, Government
Article link

Can Kevin Costner's Machines Really Help the Gulf Cleanup?

The oil-separating centrifuges will work, but they would have worked better months ago

By Dave Levitan  /  July 2010

14 July 2010—After 85 days, the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is now partially contained, and relief wells to stem the flow are inching closer to completion. Once the leak is fixed, the focus will shift to removing the oil that’s already in the water. The actor Kevin Costner has appeared on TV and in front of the U.S. Congress to tout his oil cleanup machines, but can they actually make a dent in the still-spreading environmental disaster?

Costner’s testimony on 9 June may have provided comedic fodder for late-night talk-show hosts, but according to David Meikrantz, a chemical engineer at Idaho National Laboratory who developed the technology in the early 1990s, the machines are no joke. He says there is no reason that the devices, essentially liquid-liquid separation centrifuges, shouldn’t work in the Gulf. They performed so well in BP’s initial tests that as many as 32 of them could be spinning in the Gulf in the coming weeks. But even though the technology is proven, Costner’s devices are no silver bullet.

Full article here

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