If we accept this unnamed official's argument at face value, then why is this program, and those like it, classified at the special access compartmented level.
Could it be that the object of the excessive secrecy is keep the cost and some of the performance data from the American people so that they do not know where their tax dollars are going? Of course this obvious question was of little interest to the NYT.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. official says Iran will find it hard to exploit any data and technology aboard the captured CIA stealth drone because of measures taken to limit the intelligence value of drones operating over hostile territory.
The official also said Saturday that despite Iran's latest claims to have hijacked the RQ-170 Sentinel and brought it down near the eastern Iranian city of Kashmar, the U.S. is convinced that the drone malfunctioned.
“The Iranians had nothing to do with it,” the official said.
Full Story Plus Past Posts on Drones Below the Line
BY MALIA ZIMMERMAN – KAILUA, OAHU – The U.S. Secret Service has arrived, street barricades are in place, and the U.S. Coast Guard has stationed itself in the waters surrounding Kailua, Oahu. That is a sure sign President Barack Obama’s security team is preparing for the first family to arrive in the small beachside community as early as Friday night for what is expected to be a 17-day vacation.
The President and his family are traveling separately to Hawaii because he wants resolve the payroll tax cut issue before leaving Washington – and his wife does not want to wait.
But the advanced trip and the cost that comes with it – as much as $100,000 (flight and security) – adds to an already expensive vacation for the taxpayers.
Hawaii Reporter research shows the total cost for the President’s visit for taxpayers far exceeded $1.5 million in 2010 – but is even more costly this year because he extended his vacation by three days and the cost for Air Force One travel has jumped since last assessed in 2000. In addition, Hawaii Reporter was able to obtain more specifics about the executive expenditures.
The total cost (based on what is known) for the 17-day vacation roundtrip vacation to Hawaii for the President, his family and staff has climbed to more than $4 million. Here's why.
Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet can be seen as the warm-up act for these technologies.
The concept has been around for years, sometimes called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Yet it takes time for the economics and engineering to catch up with the predictions. And that moment is upon us.
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The role of sensors — once costly and clunky, now inexpensive and tiny — was described this month in an essay in The New York Times by Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology; he said the ultimate goal was “the sensor-aware planetary computer.”
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GLOBAL PULSE is a new initiative by the United Nations to leverage data from the consumer Internet for global development. So-called sentiment analysis of messages in social networks and phone text messages — using natural-language deciphering software — can help predict job losses or lower spending in a region, or disease outbreaks.
“Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.
Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.
Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts [1]. For a sovereign’s debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.
By giving taxpayers this voice in government, the Dutch and British democracies provided creditors with much safer claims for payment than did kings and princes whose debts died with them. But the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs.
This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, communal infrastructure and extract tribute. In response, democracies are demanding referendums over whether to pay creditors by selling off the public domain and raising taxes to impose unemployment, falling wages and economic depression. The alternative is to write down debts or even annul them, and to re-assert regulatory control over the financial sector.
Those who think the Occupy movement will die away just because several encampments in major cities have been evicted are likely to be surprised.
They remind me of people who think that climate change is not going to be such a big deal because the weather in their area has been rather mild. Or the people who thought alcohol use (or drug use) would disappear because it was made illegal (prohibition). Appearances can be deceiving – especially when one only wants to see what's obvious.
I remember how the Great Peace March (which I participated in) fell apart bankrupt in the Mojave Desert two weeks after it launched from Los Angeles in March 1986 with 1200 marchers. The national media reported its demise and moved on to other topics, ignoring the fact that it re-started two weeks later with 400 marchers – still a sizable event – and proceeded to have a profound effect on every community it visited for the next eight months – as well as on the larger society through ongoing reverberations long after it ended in Washington DC in November 1986 with 1200 marchers. Not the least of these was the birth of my own work exploring co-intelligence and wisely self-organizing democracy.
Just because some energy or activity ceases to be clearly and publicly visible, doesn't mean it has died or gone away. Especially when you suppress it with violence, you almost guarantee it will continue, growing and evolving, surfacing with new energy and impacts in new times and places, often to people's great surprise. Addressing symptoms of a disturbance seldom handles the cause, which will soon find other outlets to manifest whatever need is not being met.
Domestic spying is evidence that the U.S. Government no longer trusts its own people. But the American people have more reason not to trust the government than the government has to not trust its people.
Open-source governance forces the government to trust its people. By extending trust, the government will hopefully come to realize that the American people are not its enemies. And the American people will hopefully come around once again to trusting their government.
Open-source governance is the perfect cure for healing the ever widening rift between Americans and their government, and to get Americans back to working together rather than all rowing in opposite directions. If the government stubbornly refuses to take its medicine, our country could quickly become a terminal case.
Here's a link to Celente in top form— MF Global, banksters, and predictions (not so improbable) including European bank holiday, and (my dread) war on Iran.
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In this edition of the show Max interviews Gerald Celente from trendsjournal.com.
Gerald Celente is a trends forecaster who was recently defrauded by MF Global run by former New Jersey governor, Jon Corzine, who was also former head of Goldman Sachs.
When MF Global collapsed, client cash was taken and apparently transferred to creditors, like JP Morgan.
This commingling of funds has violated the very foundation of the futures market and we talk to Celente about whether he will ever invest money with a brokerage again?
