Privacy: This night, news broke that the USA’s security agencies have been wiretapping essentially every major centralized social service for private data. Photos, video conferences, text chats, and voice calls – everything. We have been saying this for years and been declared tinfoil hat and conspiracy nuts; it’s good to finally see the documents in black on white.
This night, European time, thenewsbroke that the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) has had direct access to pretty much every social network for the past several years, dating back to 2007, under a program named PRISM. Under the program, a number of social services voluntarily feed people’s private data to the NSA. In short, if you have been using/uploading
e-mail
video or voice chat
videos
photos
stored data
VoIP calls
file transfers
video conferencing
(and more)
…from any of…
Microsoft (incl. Hotmail et al), since Sep 11, 2007
Pentagon uses advanced bunker buster bombs to destroy replica of underground facility as part of experiment whose results were relayed to friendly nations
The Pentagon has recently completed a series of field exercises on US soil as part of which a replica of an underground nuclear facility was destroyed, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Friday. The tests were declared a resounding success having exceeded all expectations.
The results of the experiment were relayed to friendly nations with the aim of reassuring them as to the US's ability to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities in a single strike. It was also meant to convey that the US is serious in its intentions to attack Iran should circumstances allow it.
Gen. Keith Alexander, the top officer at U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, testified March 12 before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the potential for an attack against the nation’s electric grid and other essential systems is real and that the federal government needed to take more aggressive steps.
At the time, Alexander said 13 cyber teams were being formed to guard the nation against destructive attacks in cyberspace, stressing that their role would be offensive. He also said the teams would work outside the United States, but he did not say where.
June 7, 2013. The payroll jobs report for May released today continues the fantasy.
Goods producing jobs declined, with manufacturing losing another 4,000 jobs, but the New Economy produced 179,000 service jobs.
Are these jobs the high-powered, high-wage “innovation jobs” that economists promised would be our reward from Globalism. I’m afraid not.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs created are the usual lowly paid non-exportable domestic service jobs–the jobs of a third world country.
“For the past 35 years, with technological advancements, there has been an explosion in production and profits, in wealth creation. That unprecedented increase in wealth, as many of you know, has gone to the top economic 1%. Most of it, the lion’s share of it, went to not even the top economic 1%, but to the top one-hundredth of one percent, to the modern day aristocracy. After analyzing the most recent data, here’s the headline: US millionaire households now have $50 trillion in wealth. They have $39 trillion in legally accounted for wealth, and an estimate of $11 trillion hidden in offshore accounts. Let that sink in for a moment… 50 TRILLION DOLLAR$. Most people cannot even comprehend how much $1 trillion is, let alone $50 trillion. One trillion is equal to 1000 billion, or $1,000,000,000,000.00. Only one-tenth of one percent of the population makes one million dollars a year, and, again, most of that wealth is in the top one-hundredth of one percent. To show how consolidated the wealth is, even in the upper most portion of the top one percentile, the richest 400 people have as much wealth as 185 million Americans combined; that’s only 400 people with as much wealth as 60% of the entire US population.
This series reveals a political and military system that is sick in its core. This toxic stew of the F-35's high cost, abetted by concurrent production, lagging performance and continuing design problems, has put U.S. and allied air power into a dive. The dive will steepen so long as F-35 production at the currently-projected rates continues. I recommend starting with Part 5, the summary by Mark Thompson of TIME Battleland Blog.
MS, Yahoo FB, Apple and the rest all deny they know anything the NSA's program – implemented with these tech giant's cooperation – called “PRISM.” It's evident from this article they are all lying:
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.
The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who know about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.
The Washington Post obtained “briefing slides” from an “internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate,” from a “career intelligence officer” who cited “firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities,” as the reason for the disclosure. These materials described PRISM as “the most prolific contributor to the President's Daily Brief” and the NSA's “leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.” The Post, goes on to report that while PRISM allows the NSA to collect “anything it likes” from the available data, it is in practice not utilized as a “dragnet” per se:
Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade key in “selectors,” or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness.” That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by the Post instruct new analysts to submit accidentally collected U.S. content for a quarterly report, “but it’s nothing to worry about.”
One may nevertheless worry about this thing that is “nothing to worry about/”
