Here's what may be called “Police State TV” – a new but an increasingly popular TV genre, brought to you by Youtube and a house owner in Boston during the bombings:
WATERTOWN, MA — On Friday, April 19, 2013, during a manhunt for a bombing suspect, police and federal agents spent the day storming people's homes and performing illegal searches. While it was unclear initially if the home searches were voluntary, it is now crystal clear that they were absolutely NOT voluntary. Police were filmed ripping people from their homes at gunpoint, marching the residents out with their hands raised in submission, and then storming the homes to perform their illegal searches.”
Michael Brenner
Senior Fellow, the Center for Transatlantic Relations; Professor of International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh
Huffington Post, 22 April 2013
The errant actions of the C.I.A. are by now so evident that they are a staple of Washington conversation. Like the weather, though, it is the topic everybody talks about, but does nothing about. The drone revelations, and the administration's stonewalling, that coincided with John Brennan's confirmation hearings created a stir. That incident struck a nerve because the White House looked ready to extend its claim to a right to kill Americans abroad to the domestic scene. The prospect of moves to bring the Agency to heal quickly died down once he made a vague promise to downsize the drone program. Moreover, no elected official voiced concern about the implications of killing lots of foreigners — even innocent civilians — as we are doing routinely in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
That may change. Now we have the graphic account of a maverick C.I.A. conducting its own clandestine war against the government of Pakistan without a stipulated authorization. And doing so in a ham-handed manner that helped to ruin whatever small chance remained of extricating ourselves from Afghanistan and neighboring frontier areas of Pakistan without leaving behind a dangerous chaos on both sides of the Durand Line. The detailed picture painted by two authoritative accounts of the notorious Raymond Davis affair, and its clamorous aftermath, provides us with a fine-grained view of studied ignorance and appalling incompetence among C.I.A. leaders in Langley and Islamabad (Mark Mazzetti, Jeremy Scahill). It also describes National Security Council sessions for which ‘dysfunctional' would be a generous term. The slanging matches among cabinet members on matters of sensitivity and importance took place with an absent commander in chief failing to exercise the policy guidance and operational oversight that are his mandate as president.
TEL AVIV ā Israelās senior military intelligence analyst said Tuesday there was evidence the Syrian government had repeatedly used chemical weapons in the last month, and he criticized the international community for failing to respond, intensifying pressure on the Obama administration to intervene.
State-sponsored industrial espionage became a bigger cyber-threat to companies in 2012, a report indicates.
Statistics gathered for Verizon's annual data breach report suggested state-sponsored hacking attacks were now the number two cyber-threat.
Top of the list were hackers looking to steal money after breaking into corporate networks,
Often, the report said, companies took months to spot a breach and discover what data had been stolen.
The study was published to coincide with Infosec – an annual security conference in London.
While hackers had financial motives in 75% of the cyber-attacks analysed for the report, in 20% of cases the perpetrators were after trade secrets or intellectual property, it stated.
“The number one statistical change we noticed is the level of state-sponsored espionage,” said security analyst Wade Baker, lead author on the report. “That's a lot higher.”
He added that 2012 was the first year that there were so many espionage-motivated attacks that they deserved their own category.
Kahlili is Ā a questionable source but he did predict that Canada would be next. He also has several lines indicating that US intelligence was warned and informed about the threat.
We have to see what happens now in France and the UK. There are indications that Hezbollah networks in Europe have been strengthened and activated. The attack in Bulgaria last year is still not solved and widely debated. Israel wants it to be a Hezbollah attack. If definite proof is found that will be a reason for the EU to blacklist Hezbollah. Over the last few months there has been a tremendous pressure by Israel and the US on the EU to do this.
I have been following this hypothesis since 2004 since I read Kenneth Timmerman's Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran, which included the official minutes of a meeting between Quds Force officials, Ayman al Zawahiri and Imad Mugniyeh discussing the strategy which Kahlili now lays out in his article. I found it a plausible hypothesis but over the last ten years I have never been able to get support for it. Very few people actually had read the book which is a must read if you want to be informed about developments in Iran.
Kahlili has today an article about the panic in Iran about his previous articles saying there was a link to Iran. Today a car bomb attack against the French embassy in Tripoli. If Kahlili is right the next attack should be against a UK target. Even when Kahlili is not trustworthy his articles are having an impact which is why I follow this guy.
Source reveals research included high-value targets inside U.S.
Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iranās Quds Forces, ordered reconnaissance and intelligence gathering on various events and public gatherings in the United States years ago, culminating in the bombings at the Boston Marathon one week ago, WND has learned.
According to a source within Iranās intelligence services, the Islamic regimeās Quds Forces, a special unit of the Revolutionary Guards in charge of extraterritorial operations, have done extensive planning on gatherings, events and high-value targets in the United States for some time, but for two years focused on events such as the Boston Marathon.
North Carolina resident Dan Tynan has taken a stand against marketing companies that track his movements online by exposing the comical inaccuracies of the data they collect.
After noticing several ads for mobile phones for the elderly as he browsed the web, Tynan discovered that hundreds of marketers were tracking his every move and coming to inaccurate conclusions about his identity.
“Some thought I was a soccer mom and some thought I was a trendy homemaker,” says Tynan, who is clearly neither.
Privacy advocates warn collecting data about individuals through the web could be dangerous, for instance because it could enable groups like insurance companies to make assumptions that could hurt consumers.
Meanwhile, US policymakers have been debating a series of proposals labelled Do Not Track, which would enable internet users to turn off online ad tracking.
But the Direct Marketing Association, which represents online marketers, says most internet users know they are being tracked online and find the ads helpful.
