Following the recent Permanent Joint Board on Defense (PJBD) meeting which took place in Ottawa, the Commander of Canada Command, Lt.-Gen Walter Semianiw and the Commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), Gen. Charles Jacoby, Jr. signed three military documents.

The first was the Combined Defense Plan which a backgrounder described as a “planning framework between Canada Command, its counterpart USNORTHCOM, and NORAD for enhanced defense cooperation between Canada and the U.S. should governments require each other’s assistance.” The second is the Information Sharing Memorandum of Understanding, “an arrangement between Canada Command, its counterpart USNORTHCOM and NORAD to identify and provide for ease of sharing information amongst the three organizations.” The Civil Assistance Plan, which was originally signed in 2008 and allows the armed forces of one nation to support the other during an emergency was also renewed for two years.

Lee Berthiaume of Postmedia News reported that:

The Combined Defense Plan has been under discussion for several years and would further integrate cross-border military co-operation at a time when the Harper government is trying to reassure Washington it has a reliable partner in Canada when it comes to security.

Defense Minister Peter MacKay is quoted as saying,

This agreement provides a framework for the combined defense of Canada and the U.S. during peace, contingencies, and war.

He added:

The plan describes the authorities and means by which the two governments would approve homeland military operations in the event of a mutually agreed threat, and how our two militaries would collaborate and share information.

In his speech in front of the PJBD, Minister MacKay also called for “increased military involvement implementing the Beyond the Border strategy, saying the Canadian Forces and its American counterparts should be supporting civilian agencies monitoring the cross-border security.” Also on the agenda at the defense forum was security cooperation in the Arctic, along with Canadian and U.S. engagement in the Western Hemisphere.

In an article for iPolitics, Colin Horgan wrote that at the recent bilateral defense meeting, “MacKay noted that such initiatives as Beyond the Border and the Regulatory Cooperation Council Action Plan will work to ensure that the vital economic partnership that joins our two countries continues to be the cornerstone of our economic competitiveness and security.”

Defense Minister MacKay emphasized that security is linked to the economy and called for even greater cooperation to support the dual action plans. He stated, “We need to increasingly focus our military forces in support of those civilian departments and agencies that have the lead.” MacKay also explained, “We need to all work together to mitigate capability gaps, share best practices and co-operate on new approaches.” He went on to say, “there is still room for more integrated collaboration – domestically and bi-nationally.”

The latest military agreements further promote a perimeter approach to security. They are part of the Tri Command Vision efforts to merge NORAD, USNORTHCOM and Canada Command into one. As for the PJBD, it has once again become more relevant as a venue for bilateral security and military dialogue. Created in 1940 the panel, “is the senior advisory body on continental defense. It is composed of military and diplomatic representatives from both nations.”

Over the years, it has, “served as a strategic-level military board charged with considering, in a broad sense, land, sea, air and space issues.” This includes areas concerning, “policy, operations, financial, logistics and other aspects of Canada-U.S. defense relations.” The PJBD is well positioned to play a significant role in plans for a fully integrated North American security perimeter, as well as in other facets of the evolving Canada-U.S. partnership.

On January 6, the Obama administration released the new document, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense. The new strategy calls for maintaining a strong presence in the Middle East, as well as an expanding role in the Asia-Pacific region. Much of the focus will be on countering China’s rising power. This will include supporting large bases in Japan and South Korea, along with stationing troops in Australia. The U.S. will also continue efforts to forge stronger military alliances with the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Burma. While the plan envisions a leaner military force, there is little doubt that Washington will continue to police the world.

How does Canada fit into this new realignment of American strategic priorities? It is clear that the U.S. will rely more on its allies during international missions. Canada may gain a greater voice in future military operations, but it will also mean that they will have to bear more of the burden. In the coming years, as NATO members begin cutting defense spending, Canada will be counted on to play an even bigger role in any possible overseas conflicts.

Whether it’s the perimeter security deal, the ongoing mission in Afghanistan or the bombing campaign that took place in Libya, the U.S. and Canada continue to enhance security and military cooperation. Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, both countries have further deepened their defense relationship. In addition, Canada has pursued a more U.S.-style foreign policy. This includes imposing tougher sanctions on Iran, along with further expanding sanctions against Syria.

Much like the U.S., Harper has singled out Iran as a threat to international peace and security. He has echoed the same sentiments that the regime is seeking a nuclear weapon and would be prepared to use it.

Defense Minister Peter MacKay has also indicated that if necessary, Canada’s armed forces are ready to offer assistance in Syria. More than ever, the U.S, and Canada share a more common approach to advancing security interests in not only North America, but around the globe.

Why is Ron Paul America’s last chance?

Because he is the only candidate who is not owned lock, stock, and barrel by the military-security complex, Wall Street, and the Israel Lobby.

All of the others, including President Obama, are owned by exactly the same interest groups. There are no differences between them. Every candidate except Ron Paul stands for war and a police state, and all have demonstrated their complete and total subservience to Israel. The fact that there is no difference between them is made perfectly clear by the absence of substantive issues in the campaigns of the Republican candidates.

Only Ron Paul deals with real issues, so he is excluded from “debates” in which the other Republican candidates throw mud at one another: “Gingrich voted $60 million to a UN program supporting abortion in China.” “Romney loves to fire people.”

The mindlessness repels.

More importantly, only Ron Paul respects the US Constitution and its protection of civil liberty. Only Ron Paul understands that if the Constitution cannot be resurrected from its public murder by Congress and the executive branch, then Americans are lost to tyranny.

There isn’t much time in which to revive the Constitution. One more presidential term with no habeas corpus and no due process for US citizens and with torture and assassination of US citizens by their own government, and it will be too late. Tyranny will have been firmly institutionalized, and too many Americans from the lowly to the high and mighty will have been implicated in the crimes of the state. Extensive guilt and complicity will make it impossible to restore the accountability of government to law.

If Ron Paul is not elected president in this year’s election, by 2016 American liberty will be in a forgotten grave in a forgotten grave yard.

Having said this, there is no way Ron Paul can be elected, for these reasons:

Not enough Americans understand that the “war on terror” has been used to create a police state. The brainwashed citizenry believe that the police state is making them safe from terrorists.

Liberals, progressives, and the left-wing oppose Ron Paul, claiming that “he would abolish the social safety net, privatize Social Security and Medicare, throw the widows and orphans into the street, abolish the Federal Reserve,” etc.

Apparently, liberals, progressives, and the left-wing do not understand that privatizing Social Security and Medicare and destroying the social safety net are policies that many conservative Republicans favor and are policies that Wall Street is forcing on both political parties. In contrast, a President Ron Paul would be isolated in the White House and would never be able to muster the support of Congress and the powerful interest groups to achieve such radical changes. Moreover, Ron Paul has made it clear that a welfare-free state cannot be achieved by decree but only by creating an economy in which opportunity exists for people to stand on their own feet. Ron Paul has said that he does not support ending welfare before an economy is created that makes a welfare state unnecessary.

Candidate Paul cannot take any steps to reassure Americans that he would not throw them to the mercy of the free market, because his libertarian base would turn on him as another unprincipled politician willing to sacrifice his principles for political expediency.

If libertarians were not inflexible, candidate Paul could endorse Ron Unz’s proposal to solve the illegal immigration problem by raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour, so that Americans could afford to work the jobs that are taken by illegals.

Economist James K. Galbraith is probably correct that Unz’s proposal would boost the economy by injecting purchasing power and that the unemployment would be largely confined to illegals who would return to their home country. However, if Ron Paul were to treat Unz’s proposal as one worthy of study and consideration, libertarian ideologues would write him off. Whatever liberal/progressive support he gained would be offset by the loss of his libertarian base.

Why can’t libertarians be as intelligent as Ron Unz and see that if the Constitution is lost all that remains is tyranny?

In short, Americans cannot see beyond their ideologies to the real issue, which is the choice between the Constitution and tyranny.

So we hear absurd accusations that Ron Paul, a libertarian “is a racist.” “Ron Paul is an anti-semite.” “Ron Paul would favor the rich and hurt the poor.”

We don’t hear “Ron Paul would restore and protect the US Constitution.”

What do Americans think life will be like in the absence of the Constitution? I will tell you what it will be like, but first let’s consider the obstacles Ron Paul would face if he were to win the Republican nomination and if he were to be elected president.

In my opinion, if Ron Paul were to win the Republican nomination, the Republican Party would conspire to refuse it to him. The party would simply nominate a different candidate.

If despite everything, Ron Paul were to end up in the White House, he would not be able to form a government that would support his policies. Appointments to cabinet secretaries and assistant secretaries that would support his policies could not be confirmed by the US Senate. President Paul would have to appoint whomever the Senate would confirm in order to form a government. The Senate’s appointees would undermine his policies.

What a President Ron Paul could do, assuming Congress, controlled by powerful private interest groups, did not impeach him on trumped up charges, would be to use whatever forums that might be permitted him to explain to the public, judges, and law schools that the danger from terrorists is miniscule compared to the danger from a government unaccountable to law and the Constitution.

The reason we should vote for Ron Paul is to signal to the powers that be that we understand what they are doing to us. If Paul were to receive a large vote, it could have two good effects. One could be to introduce some caution into the establishment that would slow the march into more war and tyranny. The other is it would signal to Washington’s European and Japanese puppets that not all Americans are stupid sheep. Such an indication could make Washington’s puppet states more cautious and less cooperative with Washington’s drive for world hegemony.

What America Without the Constitution Will Be Like

In the January 4 Huff Post, attorney and author John Whitehead reported on the militarization of local police. Some police forces are now equipped with spy drones. Whitehead reports that a drone manufacturer, AeroVironment Inc., plans to sell 18,000 drones to police departments throughout the country. The company is also advertising a small drone, the “Switchblade,” which can track a person, land on the person and explode.

How long before Americans will be spied upon or murdered as extremists at the discretion of local police?

Recognizing the privacy danger, if not the murder danger, the American Civil Liberties Union has issued a report, “Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance.”

The ACLU believes, correctly, that liberty is threatened by “a surveillance society in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded, and scrutinized by authorities.”

The ACLU calls on Congress to legislate privacy protections against the police use of drones. I support the ACLU because it is the most important defender of civil liberty despite other misguided activities, but I wonder what the ACLU is thinking. Congress and the federal courts have already acquiesced in the federal government’s warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency. The Bush regime violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act many times, and all involved, including President Bush, should have been sent to prison for many lifetimes, as each violation carries a 5-year prison term. But the executive branch emerged scot free. No one was held accountable for clear violations of US statutory law.

The ACLU might think that although the federal executive branch has successfully elevated itself above the law, state and local police forces are still accountable. We must hope that they are, but I doubt it.

The militarization of local police has received some attention. What has not received attention is that state and local police are also being federalized. It is not only military armaments and spy technology that local police are receiving from Washington, but also an attitude toward the public along with federal oversight and the collaboration that goes with it. When Homeland Security, a federal police force, comes into states, as I know has occurred in Georgia and Tennessee, and doubtless other states, and together with the state police stop cars and trucks on Interstate highways and subject them to warrantless searches, what is happening is the de facto deputizing of the state police by Homeland Security. This is the way that Goering and Himmler federalized into the Gestapo the independent police forces of German provinces such as Prussia and Bavaria.

Homeland Security has expanded its warrantless searches far beyond “airline security.”

The budding gestapo agency now conducts warrantless searches on the nation’s highways, on bus and train passengers, and at Social Security offices. On Tuesday January 3, 2012, the Social Security office in Leesburg, Florida, apparently a terrorist hotspot, became a Homeland Security checkpoint. The DHS Gestapo armed with automatic weapons and sniffer dogs demanded IDs from local residents visiting their local Social Security office.

Thomas Milligan, district manager for the Social Security Administration office, said staff were not informed their offices were about to be stormed by armed federal police officers. DHS officials refused to answer questions asked by local media and left with no explanation at noon, reports infowars.com.

The DHS gestapo justified its takeover of a Leesburg Florida Social Security office as being an integral part of “Operational Shield,” conducted by the Federal Protective Service to detect “the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities.”

One wonders if even brainwashed flag-waving “superpatriots” can miss the message. The Social Security office of Leesburg, Florida, population 19,086 in central Florida is not a place where terrorists devoid of proper ID might be visiting. To protect America from the scant possibility that terrorists might be congregating at the Leesburg Social Security office, the tyrants in Washington sent the Federal Protective Service at who knows what cost to demand ID from locals visiting their Social Security office.

What is this all about except to establish the precedent that federal police, a new entity in American life, the Federal Protective Service, has authority over state and local police offices and can appear out of the blue to interrogate local citizens.

Why the ACLU thinks it is going to get any action out of a Congress that has accommodated the executive branch’s destruction of habeas corpus, due process, and the constitutional and legal prohibitions against torture is beyond me. But at least the issue is raised. But don’t expect to hear about it from the “mainstream media.”

Americans in 2012, although only a few are aware, live in a concentration camp that is far better controlled than the one portrayed by George Orwell in 1984. Orwell, writing in the late 1940s could not imagine the technology that makes control of populations so thorough as it is today. Orwell’s protagonist could at least have hope. In 2012 with the erasure of privacy by the US government, protagonists can be eliminated by hummingbird-sized drones before they can initiate a protest, much less a rebellion.

Never in human history has a people been so easily and willingly controlled by a hostile government as Americans, who are the least free people on earth. And a large percentage of Americans still wave the flag and chant USA! USA! USA!

The Bush regime operated as if the Constitution did not exist. Any semblance of constitutional government that remained after the Bush years was terminated when Congress passed and President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act. One wonders how the National Rifle Association, the defender of the Second Amendment, will now fare. If there is no Constitution, how can there be a Second Amendment? If the President, at his discretion, can set aside habeas corpus and due process and murder citizens based on unproven suspicions, why can’t he set aside the Second Amendment?

Indeed, it is folly to expect a police state to tolerate an armed population.

The NRA is very supportive of the police and military. Now that these armed organizations are being turned against the public, how will the NRA adjust its posture?

Many NRA members, pointing to the “Oath Keepers,” former members of the military who pledge to defend the Constitution, and to police chiefs who support the Second Amendment, believe that the police and military will disobey orders to attack citizens.

But we already witness constantly the gratuitous brutality of “our” police against peaceful protesters. We witness military troops all over the world murder citizens who protest government abuses. Why can’t it happen here?

If you don’t want it to happen here, you had better figure out some way to get Ron Paul into the Presidency and to get him a cabinet and subcabinet that will support him.

Meanwhile, the police state grows. On January 4, 2012, the Obama regime announced by decree, not by legislation, the creation of the Bureau of Counterterrorism which will among other tasks “seek to strengthen homeland security, countering violent extremism.”

Take a moment to think. Do you know of any “violent extremism” happening in the US?

The regime is telling you that it needs a new police bureau with unaccountable powers to “strengthen homeland security” against a nonexistent bogyman.

So who will be the violent extremists who require countering by the Bureau of Counterterrorism? It will be peace activists, the Occupy Wall Street protesters, the unemployed and foreclosed homeless. It will be whoever the police state says. And there is no due process or recourse to law.

Given the facts before you, you are out of your mind if you think Ron Paul’s rhetoric against the welfare state is more important than his defense of liberty.

On December 7, President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the Beyond the Border Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness Action Plan. The new deal focuses on addressing security threats early, facilitating trade, economic growth and jobs, integrating cross-border law enforcement, as well as improving infrastructure and cyber-security. It will act as a roadmap with different parts being phased in over the next several years. This includes the creation of various pilot projects. Many aspects of the agreement will also depend on the availability of funding from both governments. In addition, the two leaders issued a separate Regulatory Cooperation Council Action Plan that sets out initiatives whereby the U.S. and Canada will seek greater regulatory alignment in the areas of agriculture and food, transportation, environment, health, along with consumer products.

At a Joint News Conference, President Obama declared that, “Canada is key to achieving my goal of doubling American exports and putting folks back to work. And the two important initiatives that we agreed to today will help us do just that.” He went on to say, “we’re agreeing to a series of concrete steps to bring our economies even closer and to improve the security of our citizens.” Obama also added, “we’re going to improve our infrastructure, we’re going to introduce new technologies, we’re going to improve cargo security and screening.” Prime Minister Harper proclaimed that, “These agreements create a new, modern order for a new century. Together, they represent the most significant steps forward in Canada-U.S. cooperation since the North American Free Trade Agreement.” He explained that, “The first agreement merges U.S. and Canadian security concerns with our mutual interest in keeping our border as open as possible to legitimate commerce and travel.” Harper described how, “The second joint initiative will reduce regulatory barriers to trade by streamlining and aligning standards.”

Some of the measures found in the Beyond the Border action plan include conducting joint, integrated threat assessments; improving cooperative law enforcement capacity and national intelligence- and information-sharing; cooperating on research and best practices to prevent and counter homegrown violent extremism; working to jointly prepare for, and respond to, binational disasters and enhancing cross-border critical infrastructure protection and resilience. Other facets of the deal will work towards adopting an integrated cargo security strategy; implementing entry and exit verification; establishing and verifying the identity of foreign travellers to North America; better aligning Canadian and U.S. programs for low-risk travellers and installing radio frequency identification technology at key border crossings.

As part of the agreement, both countries will “implement two Next-Generation pilot projects to create integrated teams in areas such as intelligence and criminal investigations, and an intelligence-led uniformed presence between ports of entry.” This will build on past joint law enforcement initiatives such as the Shiprider program and the Integrated Border Enforcement Teams. The Next-Generation pilot projects are scheduled to be deployed by the summer of 2012. In September, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder revealed plans that would allow law enforcement officers to operate on both sides of the border. He announced that, “the creation of ‘NextGen’ teams of cross-designated officers would allow us to more effectively identify, assess, and interdict persons and organizations involved in transnational crime.” Holder also commented that, “In conjunction with the other provisions included in the Beyond the Border Initiative, such a move would enhance our cross-border efforts and advance our information-sharing abilities.”

In his article, How the U.S. blackmailed Canada, Gar Pardy stressed that as part of a North American security zone, “Canadian security institutions will be more closely integrated with those of the United States.” While addressing the Beyond the Border declaration and the subsequent action plan, he highlighted the fact that, “these are not formal treaties or even formal agreements, although there could be greater formality in the future.” Pardy also noted, “Nowhere in the documentation resulting from the two meetings are there suggestions the people of Canada will be provided with detailed information on which judgments can be made on the wisdom of this consensual agreement negotiated in the backrooms of both capitals.” Instead he cautioned that, “the troublesome details implicit in the agreement will be hidden behind the wall of national security.” Pardy argued that in the process, “Canada sold its national security independence in exchange for hoped-for minor changes to American border restrictions.” He concluded that, “It is not an overstatement to suggest the United States blackmailed the government of Canada into making this deal. It was the American way or no way.”

The Council of Canadians have also strongly rejected the new border deal. They have challenged the notion that, “proper privacy protections can be achieved between Canada and the U.S. without significantly diluting stronger Canadian laws and norms.” Citing privacy concerns associated with the U.S. Patriot Act, the organization emphasized that, “the proposed new entry-exit system for travelers needs the greatest scrutiny by Canadian parliamentarians, security and privacy experts.” The Council of Canadians also criticized, “the government for hiding behind a sham public consultation and implying that this should clear the way for implementation of the action plan.” In August, the Conservative government released two reports which summarized online public input received concerning regulatory cooperation, as well as perimeter security and economic competitiveness. While improving the movement of trade and travel was the priority for business groups, many individuals expressed concerns over the loss of sovereignty, along with the protection of personal information.

When it comes to regulatory convergence, Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians agreed that, “Standardization can be a good thing when standards are high,” She conceded, “The problem is standards aren’t higher in the U.S. in many cases.” Barlow also acknowledged that, “Already Health Canada and other agencies consider harmonization with U.S. standards to be a more important consideration than the real safety of our food. This perimeter deal cements that skewed priority list.” There are fears that it could erode any independent Canadian regulatory capacity and weaken existing regulations. Part of the SPP agenda called for improving regulatory cooperation which resulted in Canada raising pesticide limits on fruits and vegetables. Regulatory integration threatens Canadian sovereignty and democracy. Further harmonization with the U.S. could result in Canada losing control over its ability to regulate food safety. This could also lead to a race to the bottom with respect to other regulatory standards.

By all accounts, big business is the winner in the new trade and security perimeter deal. Maude Barlow explained that, “this process has been set up to accommodate one sector of our community and that is big business.” In advance of the action plans being unveiled to the public, business stakeholders were briefed on the specifics. The Canadian Council of Chief Executives, an organization that lobbies the government on behalf of Canada’s largest corporations has given it their stamp of approval. The U.S. and Canadian Chambers of Commerce also applauded the new vision for border and regulatory cooperation. When it comes to negotiations on the border security agreement, Barlow confirmed that, “the big business community was the only sector at the table with government and guided the process from the beginning.” This was also the case with the now defunct SPP. Big business was a driving force behind the initiative which led to the creation of the North American Competitiveness Council to ensure that corporate interests were being addressed.

In her article, Maude Barlow also warned that when it comes to the perimeter deal, “Canada is essentially giving up policy control in the key areas of privacy, security, immigration and surveillance in order to entice the U.S. to loosen controls at the border.” She stated, “it is likely to lead to a wholesale replacement of Canadian privacy and security standards with American ones, set by Homeland Security.” When it comes to information being collected and stored, Barlow questioned whether it will be, “used as a form of social control, to identify not terrorists, but activists and dissenters of government policy.” She insisted that, “We must call on our government to create a full public and Parliamentary debate before this deal becomes operational.” From the beginning, the whole process has lacked transparency with no congressional or parliamentary oversight. This has drawn comparisons to the SPP which was shrouded in secrecy and fueled by fears over the loss of sovereignty that finally led to its downfall. We can only hope that this latest endeavour will meet the same fate. With the 2012 U.S. election cycle about to get into full swing, the new bilateral deal could get lost in the shuffle.

While the perimeter agreement is being sold as vital to the safety and prosperity of Canadians and Americans alike, there is little doubt that it will mean a tradeoff between sovereignty and security. Any deal which gives the Department of Homeland Security more personal information poses a serious risk to privacy rights. As both countries move forward, perimeter security will be further defined and dominated by American interests. This could force Canada to comply with any new U.S. security measures, regardless of the dangers they may pose to civil liberties. A North American Homeland Security perimeter goes well beyond keeping people safe from any perceived threats. It is a means to secure trade, resources, as well as corporate interests and is a pretext for control over the continent. Ultimately, the U.S. wants the final say on who is allowed to enter and who is allowed to leave.

I know. I lived through it on the Patriot Act. When Congress decided to squelch the truth about the CIA’s advance warnings about 9/11 and the existence of a comprehensive peace option with Iraq, as the CIA’s chief Asset covering Iraq, I became an overnight threat. To protect their cover-up scheme, I got locked in federal prison inside Carswell Air Force Base, while the Justice Department battled to detain me “indefinitely” up to 10 years, without a hearing or guilty plea. Worst yet, they demanded the right to forcibly drug me with Haldol, Ativan and Prozac, in a violent effort to chemically lobotomize the truth about 9/11 and Iraqi Pre-War Intelligence.

Critically, because my legal case was controlled by civilian Courts, my Defense had a forum to fight back. The Judge was an independent arbiter. And that made all the difference. If this law on military detentions had been active, my situation would have been hopeless. The Patriot Act was bad enough. Mercifully, Chief Justice Michael B. Mukasey is a preeminent legal scholar who recognized the greater impact of my case. Even so, he faced a terrible choice —declaring me “incompetent to stand trial,” so my case could be killed—or creating dangerous legal precedents tied to secret charges, secret evidence, secret grand jury testimony and indefinite detention—from the Patriot Act’s arsenal of weapons against truth tellers—that would impact all defendants in the U.S. Courts.

It was a hideous choice—The judicial farce was more ugly because it stamped me a “religious maniac” for believing in God—a ludicrous argument. It lined up beautifully, however, with Congress’ desire to bastardize the “incompetence” of Assets engaged in Pre-War Intelligence. Anything to escape responsibility for their own poor decision making.

To this day, it scorches my heart with rage and betrayal. It was unforgivable on so many levels.

And it had nothing to do with fighting terrorism. This was about fighting truth—and protecting powerful leaders in Washington determined to glorify themselves with phony patriotism and media fireworks in the War on Terrorism—a fantasy if there was one.

Those of us with the facts at our fingertips, who could expose leadership fraud and deceptions, had to be destroyed. I had three strikes against me. First off, I had personal knowledge of the CIA’s advance warnings about 9/11, and how Republican leaders thwarted efforts to preempt the attack. Secondly, I had direct knowledge of Iraq’s contributions to the 9/11 investigation, and how Republican leaders rejected financial documents on early Al Qaeda figures like Ramzi Youssef and Sheikh Abdul Rahmon of Egypt and Sheikh al Zawahiri—who replaced Osama bin Laden as Al Qaeda’s leader. That would have shut down the financial pipeline for terrorism, if Washington cared about results. Finally, my team had successfully negotiated a peace framework with Baghdad that would have achieved all objectives in Iraq without firing a shot.

Oh I was a threat to the Washington elite, no doubt. Without the Patriot Act, the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq would have failed. Given normal due process, I would have shouted truth from the rooftops and exposed them all.

Let’s not mince words. Members of Congress who support laws like the Patriot Act and Military Detentions fear the American people deeply. They hate what America stands for. Above all they fear exposure of their mediocrity as our leaders. They are desperate to hide their leadership failures. And so they commit Treason against us— savaging the liberties enshrined in our Constitution to safeguard their access to power, weakening our ability to challenge them openly, building a society of fear.

They ply us with buzzwords—like “anti-terrorism” and “national security.” But they are the greatest threat facing our nation today. They are traitors among us.

Terrorism is a buzz-word to quiet outrage over this shredding of the Constitution. Most Americans don’t understand that the Patriot Act has expanded the scope of terrorism to cover any free political speech that challenges Institutions of Authority. Acts of violence are not necessary. The possibility that free speech could weaken public trust in leadership qualifies as the New Sedition. Any political speech that provokes the People to think and question authority can be squashed as a threat to political control.

I was no Traitor. My whole life was dedicated to non-violence. My bona fides in anti-terrorism were the best anywhere. I gave advance warning about the 9/11 attack, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. When the FBI cracked open my computer, they found proof that my team had run one of the very first investigations of Osama bin Laden in 1998, before the Dar es Salaam/Nairobi bombings. I started negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial with Libya, and preliminary talks on resuming weapons inspections in Iraq.

I was a very real threat, however. I was guilty of possessing inconvenient knowledge powerful enough to persuade voters to throw a lot of deceptive politicians out of Congress.

Military detentions would push America farther into the abyss. First, it eliminates the need for charges against political defendants altogether. And secondly, it transfers decisions about a defendant’s fate away from the oversight of a civilian Judge to a military Sentry and base commander. It’s a complete negation of the Courts.

At a practical level, there are consequences that Americans would never dream possible:

• There’s no requirement for Military Officers to acknowledge that a prison exists inside a military base. Nor can Military officers be compelled to identify individuals who might be detained on the base.

• There’s no guarantee an attorney would be assigned to the accused. Indeed, the Sentry and Commanding Officer would have full authority, individually, to decide whether attorney visits shall be allowed at all. Access to an attorney would be a matter of military discretion, including frequency and duration. The Military Commander or sentry could decide to prohibit an attorney from entering the base altogether, without specifying a reason.

This must be underscored. Civilian Judges provide a fail-safe for defendants under military auspices. Under the proposed law, that protection would be removed. The Commanding Officer of the military base would assume full authority of the Court. The accused inmate would have nowhere to protest any aspect of the detention, or to move towards resolution.

• Since the military alone decides who enters the base, the Sentry would have the power to reject visits by Family or Journalists, if they so choose.

• In straight violation of the 8th Amendment of the Constitution, accused civilians would be denied the right to petition for bail

• Military prisoners might have limited rights to send letters or make phone calls to family or attorneys, at the discretion of the Commanding Officer. The military would have the right to keep a defendant totally incommunicado from the world.

• An accused person would have no automatic rights to recreation outside of the cell. Prisoners could be locked in a 10 X 12 room 24-7, and denied the rights to exercise for one hour in a prison yard. That would be “indefinite,” too.

• Like Bradley Manning, they could be forced to sleep almost naked with the lights on, under 24 hour surveillance, even in the absence of suicide threats.

Don’t bother arguing about it. One of the high points of my legal drama occurred when my fantastic and beloved Uncle Ted Lindauer—a family member— who happened to have 40 years of senior legal experience— jumped into my legal fray in a Herculean effort to restore my freedom.

Three Times Tenacious Uncle Ted Drove 700 Miles (1,000 kms) in Each Direction—from southern Illinois to Fort Worth, Texas. He carried proper identification and proof of his legal standing. He was registered on my visitor’s list, and prison authorities understood that he was functioning as Co-Counsel for my Defense.

On the first and second visits, Ted Lindauer arrived on the weekend during normal visiting hours. Nevertheless, the Sentry swore up and down that there was no prison inside Carswell Air Force Base, and I was not an inmate—

Horrified, Ted Lindauer requested to speak with the Commanding Officer on duty.

Confronted with letters mailed from the prison and Court documents signed by Judge Mukasey, nevertheless, the Sentry and Commanding Officer refused to back down. Both stubbornly denied that I was housed anywhere on their military base.

On the second visit, the Sentry and Commanding Officer had a new excuse. Yeah, there was a prison on Carswell Air Force Base. But there were no visiting hours on weekends. Other prison families stood close by. One after the other, the sentry granted them access to the base to visit their relatives detained at the prison. Yet when Ted Lindauer, a 70 year old man with silver hair, stepped forward, the sentry guard refused.

Ted was furious. He warned the Sentry that my family knows some Generals, too! He insisted on the sanctity of my rights to attorney access, and promised to file a complaint with Judge Mukasey to compel the military to allow this attorney visit to occur.

Ted swore that he would return with U.S. Marshals. And by God, he was coming onto that base.

Thankfully, there was a civilian Judge to back him up. Judge Mukasey raised hell. On the third visit, he did indeed order U.S. Marshals to flank Ted Lindauer at the front gates of Carswell Air Force Base.

Judge Mukasey waited in his Chambers in New York ready to give the order. Only when U.S. Marshals stood before them, ready to forcibly enter the base, did Carswell back down. They stopped pretending there was no prison, that I was not an inmate, and granted my Uncle—a family member and attorney—access to his client.

It’s a cautionary tale. The military is not equipped to handle this type of responsibility. It flies against all of their structure. And it illustrates poignantly why a Civilian Judge is critical to protecting a defendant’s rights when the military has physical jurisdiction.

All of this was occurring at a critical juncture. At that moment, citing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was arguing that I should be detained “indefinitely” up to 10 years—with no right to a trial or hearing. More horribly still, the Justice Department was demanding the right to forcibly drug me with Haldol—a rhinoceros tranquilizer—until I could be “cured” of knowing the real facts about Iraq and 9/11 and serious leadership failures in the War on Terrorism.

Witness had already told the FBI about my work as an Asset—and my team’s all important advance warnings about 9/11. The Feds understood very precisely what they were hiding—and who would be the losers in Washington, if my story was told.

Because I was denied the right to a hearing, I was blocked from providing that validation to the Court–or the American public—something Republicans on Capitol Hill feared desperately. Without a hearing, the Feds had free rein to savage my reputation with fantastic embellishments, portraying me as a religious maniac. (I freely confess that I have rock solid faith in God. However, the Justice Department played fast and loose with descriptions of my spirituality).

By the end of it, all of my Constitutional rights had been savagely violated— My 1st Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion; my 4th Amendment protections against illegal searches of my home; my 5th Amendment rights not to be forcibly interrogated by surrogates for the prosecution; my 6th Amendment rights to a speedy trial by a jury of my peers, with the rights to face my accusers and rebut accusations in a public Court of law. The Justice Department even violated my 8th Amendment protections against threats of torture, (forcibly drugging definitely qualifies).

To this day, I cannot believe such abuse could be possible in the United States. I’m a fighter, and I could not stop them. All the Constitutional protections that should have saved me were stripped away. It horrifies me.

No American really understands the preciousness of Liberty until more powerful individuals in the government fight to take away those rights. Then in a blinding flash, you are awed by the magnificence of the Founding Fathers’ vision. What they gave us was extraordinary. It must be protected from tyrants like those in Congress today. They are tyrants who fear and despise us. There is no ambiguity. They are against us.

President Obama must veto this bill or confess his hypocrisy as a champion of liberty. And members of Congress who support military detentions or the Patriot Act must be targeted for defeat in 2012.

They are the greatest threats facing this country today.

They are traitors to freedom. They are Enemies of the Constitution. And they deserve to be branded Enemies of the State.

Patriot Act

On May 27, 2011, President Obama, over widespread bipartisan objections, approved a Congressional four year extension of controversial parts of the Patriot Act that were set to expire.  In March of 2010, Obama signed a similar extension of the Patriot Act for one year.  These provisions allow the government, with permission from a special secret court, to seize records without the owner’s knowledge, conduct secret surveillance of suspicious people who have no known ties to terrorist groups and to obtain secret roving wiretaps on people.

Criminalization of Dissent and Militarization of the Police

Anyone who has gone to a peace or justice protest in recent years has seen it – local police have been turned into SWAT teams, and SWAT teams into heavily armored military.  Officer Friendly or even Officer Unfriendly has given way to police uniformed like soldiers with SWAT shields, shin guards, heavy vests, military helmets, visors, and vastly increased firepower.  Protest police sport ninja turtle-like outfits and are accompanied by helicopters, special tanks, and even sound blasting vehicles first used in Iraq.  Wireless fingerprint scanners first used by troops in Iraq are now being utilized by local police departments to check motorists.  Facial recognition software introduced in war zones is now being used in Arizona and other jurisdictions.  Drones just like the ones used in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan are being used along the Mexican and Canadian borders.  These activities continue to expand under the Obama administration.

Wiretaps

Wiretaps for oral, electronic or wire communications, approved by federal and state courts, are at an all-time high.  Wiretaps in year 2010 were up 34% from 2009, according to the Administrative Office of the US Courts.

Criminalization of Speech

Muslims in the US have been targeted by the Obama Department of Justice for inflammatory things they said or published on the internet.  First Amendment protection of freedom of speech, most recently stated in a 1969 Supreme Court decision, Brandenberg v Ohio, says the government cannot punish inflammatory speech, even if it advocates violence unless it is likely to incite or produce such action.  A Pakistani resident legally living in the US was indicted by the DOJ in September 2011 for uploading a video on YouTube.  The DOJ said the video was supportive of terrorists even though nothing on the video called for violence.  In July 2011, the DOJ indicted a former Penn State student for going onto websites and suggesting targets and for providing a link to an explosives course already posted on the internet.

Domestic Government Spying on Muslim Communities

In activities that offend freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and several other laws, the NYPD and the CIA have partnered to conduct intelligence operations against Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere.  The CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans, works with the police on “human mapping”, commonly known as racial and religious profiling to spy on the Muslim community.  Under the Obama administration, the Associated Press reported in August 2011, informants known as “mosque crawlers,” monitor sermons, bookstores and cafes.

Top Secret America

In July 2010, the Washington Post released “Top Secret America,” a series of articles detailing the results of a two year investigation into the rapidly expanding world of homeland security, intelligence and counter-terrorism.   It found 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence at about 10,000 locations across the US.  Every single day, the National Security Agency intercepts and stores more than 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications. The FBI has a secret database named Guardian that contains reports of suspicious activities filed from federal, state and local law enforcement.  According to the Washington Post, Guardian contained 161,948 files as of December 2009.  From that database there have been 103 full investigations and at least five arrests the FBI reported.  The Obama administration has done nothing to cut back on the secrecy.

Other Domestic Spying

There are at least 72 fusion centers across the US which collect local domestic police information and merge it into multi-jurisdictional intelligence centers, according to a recent report by the ACLU.  These centers share information from federal, state and local law enforcement and some private companies to secretly spy on Americans.  These all continue to grow and flourish under the Obama administration.

Abusive FBI Intelligence Operations

The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented thousands of violations of the law by FBI intelligence operations from 2001 to 2008 and estimate that there are over 4000 such violations each year.  President Obama issued an executive order to strengthen the Intelligence Oversight Board, an agency which is supposed to make sure the FBI, the CIA and other spy agencies are following the law.  No other changes have been noticed.

Wikileaks

The publication of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks and then by main stream news outlets sparked condemnation by the Obama administration officials who said the publication of accurate government documents was nothing less than an attack on the United States.  The Attorney General announced a criminal investigation and promised “this is not saber rattling.” Government officials warned State Department employees not to download the publicly available documents.  A State Department official and Columbia officials warned students that discussing Wikileaks or linking documents to social networking sites could jeopardize their chances of getting a government job, a position that lasted several days until reversed by other Columbia officials.  At the time this was written, the Obama administration continued to try to find ways to prosecute the publishers of Wikileaks.

Censorship of Books by the CIA

In 2011, the CIA demanded extensive cuts from a memoir by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, in part because it made the agency look bad.  Soufan’s book detailed the use of torture methods on captured prisoners and mistakes that led to 9-11. Similarly, a 2011 book on interrogation methods by former CIA agent Glenn Carle was subjected to extensive black outs.  The CIA under the Obama administration continues its push for censorship.

Blocking Publication of Photos of U.S. Soldiers Abusing Prisoners

In May 2009, President Obama reversed his position of three weeks earlier and refused to release photos of US soldiers abusing prisoners.  In April 2009, the US Department of Defense told a federal court that it would release the photos.  The photos were part of nearly 200 criminal investigations into abuses by soldiers.

Technological Spying

The Bay Area Transit System, in August 2011, hearing of rumors to protest against fatal shootings by their police, shut down cell service in four stations.  Western companies sell email surveillance software to repressive regimes in China, Libya and Syria to use against protestors and human rights activists.  Surveillance cameras monitor residents in high crime areas, street corners and other governmental buildings.  Police department computers ask for and receive daily lists from utility companies with addresses and names of every home address in their area.  Computers in police cars scan every license plate of every car they drive by.  The Obama administration has made no serious effort to cut back these new technologies of spying on citizens.

Use of “State Secrets” to Shield Government and Others from Review

When the Bush government was caught hiring private planes from a Boeing subsidiary to transport people for torture to other countries, the Bush administration successfully asked the federal trial court to dismiss a case by detainees tortured because having a trial would disclose “state secrets” and threaten national security.  When President Obama was elected, the state secrets defense was reaffirmed in arguments before a federal appeals court.  It continues to be a mainstay of the Obama administration effort to cloak their actions and the actions of the Bush administration in secrecy.

In another case, it became clear in 2005 that the Bush FBI was avoiding the Fourth Amendment requirement to seek judicial warrants to get telephone and internet records by going directly to the phone companies and asking for the records.  The government and the companies, among other methods of surveillance, set up secret rooms where phone and internet traffic could be monitored.  In 2008, the government granted the companies amnesty for violating the privacy rights of their customers.  Customers sued anyway. But the Obama administration successfully argued to the district court, among other defenses, that disclosure would expose state secrets and should be dismissed.  The case is now on appeal.

Material Support

The Obama administration successfully asked the US Supreme Court not to apply the First Amendment and to allow the government to criminalize humanitarian aid and legal activities of people providing advice or support to foreign organizations which are listed on the government list as terrorist organizations.   The material support law can now be read to penalize people who provide humanitarian aid or human rights advocacy. The Obama administration Solicitor General argued to the court “when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs.”  The Court agreed with the Obama argument that national security trumps free speech in these circumstances.

Chicago Anti-war Grand Jury Investigation

In September 2010, FBI agents raided the homes of seven peace activists in Chicago, Minneapolis and Grand Rapids seizing computers, cell phones, passports, and records.  More than 20 anti-war activists were issued federal grand jury subpoenas and more were questioned across the country.  Some of those targeted were members of local labor unions, others members of organizations like the Arab American Action Network, the Columbia Action Network, the Twin Cities Anti-War Campaign and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  Many were active internationally and visited resistance groups in Columbia and Palestine.  Subpoenas directed people to bring anything related to trips to Columbia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Israel or the Middle East.  In 2011, the home of a Los Angeles activist was raided and he was questioned about his connections with the September 2010 activists.  All of these investigations are directed by the Obama administration.

Punishing Whistleblowers

The Obama administration has prosecuted five whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all the other administrations in history put together.  They charged a National Security Agency advisor with ten felonies under the Espionage Act for telling the press that government eavesdroppers were wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided and failed projects.  After their case collapsed, the government, which was chastised by the federal judge as engaging in unconscionable conduct allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor and walk.  The administration has also prosecuted former members of the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI.  They even tried to subpoena a journalist and one of the lawyers for the whistleblowers.

Bradley Manning

Army private Bradley Manning is accused of leaking thousands of government documents to Wikileaks.  These documents expose untold numbers of lies by US government officials, wrongful killings of civilians, policies to ignore torture in Iraq, information about who is held at Guantanamo, cover ups of drone strikes and abuse of children and much more damaging information about US malfeasance.  Though Daniel Ellsberg and other whistleblowers say Bradley is an American hero, the US government has jailed him and is threatening him with charges of espionage which may be punished by the death penalty.  For months Manning was held in solitary confinement and forced by guards to sleep naked.  When asked about how Manning was being held, President Obama personally defended the conditions of his confinement saying he had been assured they were appropriate and meeting our basic standards.

Solitary Confinement

At least 20,000 people are in solitary confinement in US jails and prisons, some estimate several times that many.  Despite the fact that federal, state and local prisons and jails do not report actual numbers, academic research estimates tens of thousands are kept in cells for 23 to 24 hours a day in supermax units and prisons, in lockdown, in security housing units, in “the hole”, and in special management units or administrative segregation.  Human Rights Watch reports that one-third to one-half of the prisoners in solitary are likely mentally ill.  In May 2006, the UN Committee on Torture concluded that the United States should “review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation.”  The Obama administration has taken no steps to cut back on the use of solitary confinement in federal, state or local jails and prisons.

Special Administrative Measures

Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) are extra harsh conditions of confinement imposed on prisoners (including pre-trial detainees) by the Attorney General.  The U.S. Bureau of Prisons imposes restrictions such segregation and isolation from all other prisoners, and limitation or denial of contact with the outside world such as: no visitors except attorneys, no contact with news media, no use of phone, no correspondence, no contact with family, no communication with guards, 24 hour video surveillance and monitoring. The DOJ admitted in 2009 that several dozen prisoners, including several pre-trial detainees, mostly Muslims, were kept incommunicado under SAMS.  If anything, the use of SAMS has increased under the Obama administration.

These twenty concrete examples document a sustained assault on domestic civil liberties in the United States under the Obama administration.  Rhetoric aside, how different has Obama been from Bush in this area?

In an article from several months back, Robert Pastor, who has been a leading proponent of continental integration, emphasized that Obama’s jobs strategy should be a North American one. He explained how the U.S. can expand trade faster by focusing on its neighbours and also pointed out that few Americans realize just how dependent the U.S. is on Canada and Mexico. In order to facilitate this approach, Pastor recommended, “We should eliminate restrictive ‘rules of origin,’ which add a tax as high as the tariff that was eliminated by NAFTA, and combine, rather than duplicate, customs’ forms, personnel and frequent-traveler programs.” He also called on President Obama to, “expand his infrastructure fund to be a North American one, with contributions from all three countries.” Pastor went on to say, “The leaders of each nation should then instruct their transportation ministers to develop a North American plan for transportation and infrastructure that would include another trade corridor from the busiest transit point in Windsor, Ontario, to southern Mexico.” This sounds a lot like plans for a NAFTA superhighway.

In his op-ed, Robert Pastor also stated, “In 2009, the three leaders of North America pledged to meet the next year, but that still hasn’t happened. Obama should invite his counterparts to address the full North American agenda, beginning with a strategy to lift the continent’s economy and then addressing transportation, immigration, education and borders. The goal should be to forge a North American community.” Pastor may have gotten part of his wish as President Barack Obama will host the North American Leaders Summit in Honolulu, Hawaii on November 13, 2011 which will include the participation of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon. The meeting is expected to focus on economic, energy, environmental and security issues. The setting could also provide an excellent opportunity for the U.S. and Canada to release an action plan that stems from bilateral trade and security perimeter talks that were launched back in February. Both countries could also further discuss the pending Keystone XL oil pipeline which would span from western Canada to Texas. President Obama has now indicated that a final decision on the project may not take place until sometime next year.

While the U.S. and Canada have been busy putting the final touches on the proposed Beyond the Border agreement, a series of unwelcome distractions have caused the initiative to lose some of its momentum. In September, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency draft report recommended the use of fencing and other barriers on the northern border. This ties into an assessment from last year by the Government Accountability Office which warned that only a small portion of the Canadian border was under operational control and even went so far as to claim that it posed a greater threat than the southern border. Although the CBP denied that a fence is being considered at this time, it does reveal that in many ways, the U.S. still thinks in terms of a two border policy with the idea of a security perimeter around the U.S. and another one around North America.

The timing of a number of protectionist measures have also proven to be a stumbling block. First, there was the Buy American provision which is included in Obama’s jobs creation plan. This was followed by the announcement that Canadian travellers will have to pay a $5.50 tax when they enter the U.S. by air or sea. Not to mention the threat of new tariffs on container cargo entering U.S. ports from Canada. The moves prompted Roland Paris to ask in his article, Is There a Problem in Canada-U.S. Relations? He acknowledged that it is, “noteworthy that several of these irritants have appeared at this time, when Canada and the U.S. are negotiating the terms of a new partnership. We are left with unanswered questions: Is the White House still committed to elaborating and pursuing a renewed agenda of bilateral cooperation?” The protectionist actions go against what both countries are supposedly trying to accomplish. They have proved to be a source of contention and reinforce Canada’s perceived weakness when dealing with its American partner.

In their article, Sad but true: Canada and Mexico have no clout in Washington, Stephen Clarkson and Matto Mildenberger argued that both countries are more valuable to the U.S. economy than most people realize. They pointed out that, “although Canada and Mexico make extraordinarily large contributions to America’s economic strength, homeland security and international effectiveness, they have virtually no influence in Washington’s corridors of power.” One of the reasons given deals with the way, “the U.S. has shaped the governance structures within which continental policy processes play out ‒ including disempowering any institutions that could give the continental periphery a voice in affecting American policies.” When it comes to Canada’s lack of influence, they contend that it centers around its willingness to, “make almost any concession in order to get access to the U.S. market. Their resulting limp bargaining culture causes Ottawa’s negotiators to back off from confrontations, then claim the resulting compromises as victories.” There are fears that the same could happen with negotiations on a perimeter security agreement with the U.S., resulting in Canada giving up more than it gains.

When it comes to foreign policy matters, Clarkson and Mildenberger also noted that even though at times Canada and Mexico have proven to be an essential support for achieving U.S. aims, it still doesn’t translate into political influence. They added, “When it comes to security, Canada’s and Mexico’s land masses are a potential menace, since they could be used by terrorist organizations to infiltrate the United States. But this proximity also turns the Canadian and Mexican governments into Washington’s prime associates in its war on terrorism, as they are in its war on drugs.” In many ways, both of these wars have morphed together and are being used as the pretext for a North American security perimeter. Growing drug violence and insecurity have allowed the U.S. to assume more control over Mexican security priorities and intelligence operations. The Merida Initiative which promotes a perimeter security strategy continues to deepen U.S.-Mexico relations. At some point, Mexico could join the U.S. and Canada as part of a formal, common security perimeter arrangement.

There is no doubt that protectionist measures, along with other factors have put a bit of a damper on the pending U.S.-Canada security perimeter agreement. If the Beyond the Border action plan is not announced by the end of the year, the whole effort could collapse. From the Canadian government’s perspective, it is essential to get some sort of deal done before the election year primaries begin in the U.S. or risk possible failure. Despite all the delays and obstacles, it is believed that the overdue action plan will soon be released. Having said that, it is now expected that it will be more modest than what was initially envisioned and for the time being will avoid some of the more contentious issues. It is also likely to include built-in structures to ensure that things happen on schedule with a list of items that both countries will pursue over the coming years. This will result in a constant implementation process making the move towards a North American security perimeter an incremental one.

When it comes to continental integration, much of the focus has shifted to greater convergence bilaterally which over time could move back to a more trilateral approach. There is an overwhelming sense that one way or another, the U.S. is going to get a North American security perimeter on their own terms, one that its NAFTA partners will have to conform to, whether they like it or not.

According to researchers, the malicious program was dubbed “Duqu” because it creates files with the prefix “~DQ.” It is a remote access Trojan (RAT) that “is essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack.” Mark that carefully.

In simple terms, a Trojan is malicious software that appears to perform a desirable function prior to its installation but, in fact, steals information from users spoofed into installing it, oftentimes via viral email attachments.

In the hands of enterprising security agencies, or criminals (the two are functionally synonymous), Trojans are primarily deployed for data theft, industrial or financial espionage, keystroke logging (surveillance) or the capture of screenshots which may reveal proprietary information.

“The threat” Symantec averred, “was written by the same authors (or those that have access to the Stuxnet source code) and appears to have been created since the last Stuxnet file was recovered.”

The malware, which began popping-up on the networks of several European firms, captured lists of running processes, account and domain information, network drives, user keystrokes and screenshots from active sessions and did so by using a valid, not a forged certificate, stolen from the Taipei-based firm, C-Media.

Whereas Stuxnet, believed to be a co-production of U.S. and Israeli cyber-saboteurs, was a weaponized virus programmed to destroy Iran’s civilian nuclear power infrastructure by targeting centrifuges that enrich uranium, Duqu is a stealthy bit of spy kit that filches data from manufacturers who produce systems that control oil pipelines, water systems and other critical infrastructure.

Sergey Golovanov, a malware expert at Kaspersky Labs told Forbes that Duqu is “is likely the brainchild of a government security apparatus. And it’s that government’s best work yet.”

Speaking from Moscow, Golovanov told Forbes in a telephone interview that “right now we are pretty sure that it is the next generation of Stuxnet.”

“We are pretty sure that Duqu is a government cyber tool and are 70% sure it is coming from the same source as Stuxnet,” Golovanov said.

“The victims’ computer systems were infected several days ago. Whatever it is,” Golovanov noted, “it is still in those systems, and still scanning for information. But what exactly it is scanning for, we don’t know. It could be gathering internal information for encryption devices. We only know that it is data mining right now, but we don’t know what kind of data and to what end it is collecting it.”

Whom, pray tell, would have “access to Stuxnet source code”?

While no government has claimed ownership of Stuxnet, IT experts told Forbes “with 100% certainty it was a government agency who created it.”

Suspects include cryptologists at the National Security Agency, or as is more likely given the outsourcing of intelligence work by the secret state, a combination of designers drawn from NSA, “black world” privateers from large defense firms along with specialists from Israel’s cryptologic division, Unit 8200, operating from the Israeli nuclear weapons lab at the Dimona complex, as The New York Times disclosed.

Analyst George Smith noted:

Stuxnet was widely distributed to many computer security experts. Many of them do contract work for government agencies, labor that would perhaps require a variety of security clearances and which would involve doing what would be seen by others to be black hat in nature. When that happened all bets were off.

Smith averred, “once a thing is in world circulation it is not protected or proprietary property.”

While one cannot demonstrably prove that Duqu is the product of one or another secret state satrapy, one can reasonably inquire: who has the means, motive and opportunity for launching this particular bit of nastiness into the wild?

“Duqu’s purpose,” Symantec researchers inform us, “is to gather intelligence data and assets from entities, such as industrial control system manufacturers, in order to more easily conduct a future attack against another third party.”

In other words, while Stuxnet was programmed to destroy industrial systems, Duqu is an espionage tool that will enable attackers “looking for information such as design documents that could help them mount a future attack on an industrial control facility.”

Although it can be argued, as Smith does, that “source code for malware has never been secure,” and “always becomes something coveted by many, often in direct proportion to its fame,” it also can’t be ruled out that military-intelligence agencies or corporate clones with more than a dog or two in the “cyberwar” hunt wouldn’t be very interested in obtaining a Trojan that clips “industrial design” information from friend and foe alike.

Black Programs

The circulation of malicious code such as Duqu’s is highly destabilizing. Considering that the U.S. Defense Department now considers computer sabotage originating in another country the equivalent to an act of war for which a military response is appropriate, the world is on dangerous new ground.

Speaking with MIT’s Technology Review, Ronald Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto think tank that researches cyberwarfare, censorship and espionage, told the publication that “in the context of the militarization of cyberspace, policymakers around the world should be concerned.”

Indeed, given the fact that it is the United States that is now the biggest proliferator in the so-called cyber “arms race,” and that billions of dollars are being spent by Washington to secure such weapons, recent history is not encouraging.

With shades of 9/11, the anthrax mailings and the Iraq invasion as a backdrop, one cannot rule out that a provocative act assigned to an “official enemy” by ruling elites just might originate from inside the U.S. security complex itself and serve as a convenient pretext for some future war.

A hint of what the Pentagon is up to came in the form of a controlled leak to The Washington Post.

Last spring, we were informed that “the Pentagon has developed a list of cyber-weapons and -tools, including viruses that can sabotage an adversary’s critical networks, to streamline how the United States engages in computer warfare.”

The list of “approved weapons” or “fires” are indicative of the military’s intention to integrate “cyberwar” capabilities into its overall military doctrine.

According to Ellen Nakashima, the “classified list of capabilities has been in use for several months and has been approved by other agencies, including the CIA.”

The Post reported that the new “framework clarifies, for instance, that the military needs presidential authorization to penetrate a foreign computer network and leave a cyber-virus that can be activated later.”

On the other hand, and here’s where Duqu may enter the frame, the “military does not need such approval, however, to penetrate foreign networks for a variety of other activities. These include studying the cyber-capabilities of adversaries or examining how power plants or other networks operate.”

Additionally, Nakashima wrote, Pentagon cyberwarriors “can also, without presidential authorization, leave beacons to mark spots for later targeting by viruses, the official said.”

As part of Washington’s on-going commitment to the rule of law and human rights, as the recent due process-free drone assassination of American citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki, followed by that of his teenage son and the revenge killing of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi by–surprise!–Al Qaeda-linked militias funded by the CIA clearly demonstrate, the “use of any cyber-weapon would have to be proportional to the threat, not inflict undue collateral damage and avoid civilian casualties.”

Try selling that to the more than 3,600 people killed or injured by CIA drone strikes, as Pakistan Body Count reported, since our Nobel laureate ascended to his Oval Office throne.

As George Mason University researchers Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins described in their recent paper, Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy, despite overheated “rhetoric of ‘cyber doom’ employed by proponents of increased federal intervention,” there is a lack of “clear evidence of a serious threat that can be verified by the public.”

However, as Brito and Watkins warned, “the United States may be witnessing a bout of threat inflation similar to that seen in the run-up to the Iraq War,” one where “a cyber-industrial complex is emerging, much like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War. This complex may serve to not only supply cybersecurity solutions to the federal government, but to drum up demand for them as well.”

A “demand” which will inevitably feed the production, proliferation and deployment of a host of viral attack tools (Stuxnet) and assorted spybots (Duqu) that can and will be used by America’s shadow warriors and well-connected corporate spies seeking to get a leg-up on the competition.

While evidence of “a serious threat” may be lacking, and while proponents of increased “cybersecurity” spending advanced “no evidence … that opponents have ‘mapped vulnerabilities’ and ‘planned attacks’,” Brito and Watkins noted there is growing evidence these are precisely the policies being pursued by Washington.

Why might that be the case?

As a declining imperialist Empire possessing formidable military and technological capabilities, researcher Stephen Graham has pointed out in Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, the United States has embarked on a multibillion dollar program “to militarize the world’s global electronic infrastructures” with a stated aim to “gain access to, and control over, any and all networked computers, anywhere on Earth.”

Graham writes that “the sorts of on-the-ground realities that result from attacks on ordinary civilian infrastructure are far from the abstract niceties portrayed in military theory.”

Indeed, as “the experiences of Iraq and Gaza forcefully remind us,” robotized drone attacks and already-existent cyberwar capabilities buried in CIA and Pentagon black programs demonstrate that “the euphemisms of theory distract from the hard fact that targeting essential infrastructure in highly urbanized societies kills the weak, the old and the ill just as surely as carpet bombing.”

A Glimpse Inside the Complex

In the wake of the HBGary hack by Anonymous earlier this year, the secrecy-shredding web site Public Intelligence released a 2009 Defense Department contract proposal from the firm.

Among other things, it revealed that the Pentagon is standing-up offensive programs that “examine the architecture, engineering, functionality, interface and interoperability of Cyber Warfare systems, services and capabilities at the tactical, operational and strategic levels, to include all enabling technologies.”

HBGary, and one can assume other juiced defense contractors, are planning “operations and requirements analysis, concept formulation and development, feasibility demonstrations and operational support.”

“This will include,” according to the leaked proposal, “efforts to analyze and engineer operational, functional and system requirements in order to establish national, theater and force level architecture and engineering plans, interface and systems specifications and definitions, implementation, including hardware acquisition for turnkey systems.”

Indeed, the company will “perform analyses of existing and emerging Operational and Functional Requirements at the force, theater, Combatant Commands (COCOM) and national levels to support the formulation, development and assessment of doctrine, strategy, plans, concepts of operations, and tactics, techniques and procedures in order to provide the full spectrum of Cyber Warfare and enabling capabilities to the warfighter.”

During the course of their analysis Symantec learned that Duqu “uses HTTP and HTTPS to communicate with a command-and-control (C&C) server that at the time of writing is still operational.”

“The attackers were able to download additional executables through the C&C server, including an infostealer that can perform actions such as enumerating the network, recording keystrokes, and gathering system information. The information is logged to a lightly encrypted and compressed local file, which then must be exfiltrated out.”

To where, and more importantly by whom was that information “exfiltrated” is of course, the $64,000 question.

A working hypothesis may be provided by additional documents published by Public Intelligence.

According to a cyberwar proposal to the Pentagon by General Dynamics and HBGary, “Project C” is described as a program for the development “of a software application targeting the Windows XP Operating System that, when executed, loads and enables a covert kernel-mode implant that will exfiltrate a file from disk (or other remotely called commands) over a connected serial port to a remote device.”

We’re informed that Project C’s “primary objectives” was the design of an implant “that is clearly able to exfiltrate an on-disk file, opening of the CD tray, blinking of the keyboard lights, opening and deleting a file, and a memory buffer exfiltration over a connected serial line to a collection station.”

“As part of the exploit delivery package,” HBGary and General Dynamics told their prospective customers, presumably the NSA, that “a usermode trojan will assist in the loading of the implant, which will clearly demonstrate the full capability of the implant.”

Duqu, according to Symantec researchers, “uses a custom C&C protocol, primarily downloading or uploading what appear to be JPG files. However, in addition to transferring dummy JPG files, additional data for exfiltration is encrypted and sent, and likewise received.”

While we don’t know which firms were involved in the design of Stuxnet and now, Duqu, we do know, thanks to Anonymous, that HBGary had a Stuxnet copy, shared it amongst themselves and quite plausibly, given what we’ve learned about Duqu, Stuxnet source code may have been related to the above-mentioned “Project C.”

Kevin Haley, Symantec’s director of product management told The Register that “the people behind Stuxnet are not done. They’ve continued to do different things. This was not a one-shot deal.”

Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay recently met with U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to discuss bilateral security cooperation issues. In a news release, Minister Mackay praised the Canada-U.S. partnership as unique and explained, “Our binational command in NORAD, as well as the daily operation between our military and defence teams is a tangible demonstration of how we stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States in the defence of North America and in addressing common global challenges.” He went on to say, “We are proud to work alongside our U.S. friends in the Americas, in Libya, in Afghanistan, and as transatlantic partners of NATO.” At a press conference following their meeting, Secretary Panetta acknowledged that both countries are looking to improve their bilateral engagement in the Western Hemisphere. He stated, “If we can develop better capabilities and partnerships throughout the hemisphere, that’s something that I think both of us consider to be a real step forward in our relationship.” Future plans could also include expanding a security perimeter framework beyond North America.

While addressing North American security efforts during a news conference with Secretary Panetta, Minister Mackay brought up the Permanent Joint Board on Defence (PJBD) which was created in 1940. The PJBD, “is the senior advisory body on continental defence. It is composed of military and diplomatic representatives from both nations.” Over the years, it has, “served as a strategic-level military board charged with considering, in a broad sense, land, sea, air and space issues.” This includes areas concerning, “policy, operations, financial, logistics and other aspects of Canada-U.S. defence relations.” Although the PJBD has been used as an alternate channel of communication, it appears to have once again become more relevant as a venue for bilateral security and military dialogue. In a move which represents its growing importance, President Barack Obama recently appointed former Congressman John Spratt, chairman of the U.S. section of the PJBD. In the coming years, the board could play a significant role in plans for a fully integrated North American security perimeter, as well as in other facets of the evolving Canada-U.S. partnership.

Released in 2008, the Canada First Defence Strategy remains the blueprint for rebuilding a modern military with clearly defined missions and capabilities. This includes increasing Canadian Forces recruitment levels, raising military spending, as well as improving and replacing equipment. The goal is for Canada to, “be a strong and reliable partner in the defence of North America, and project leadership abroad by making meaningful contributions to international security.” It goes on to say that Canadian-U.S., “armed forces will pursue their effective collaboration on operations in North America and abroad. To remain interoperable, we must ensure that key aspects of our equipment and doctrine are compatible.” It also outlines a strategy which will work towards the, “ability to conduct six core missions within Canada, in North America and globally, at times simultaneously.” Besides promoting continental perimeter security, the document lays the foundation for a more aggressive and ambitious foreign policy which increasingly represents U.S., as well as British interests.

In a recent bilateral visit to Canada, British Prime Minister David Cameron met with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and addressed a joint session of parliament where he proclaimed, “We are two nations, but under one Queen and united by one set of values.” Both leaders issued a joint declaration entitled A Stronger Partnership for the 21st Century which committed to renewing bilateral relations in areas of prosperity, security and development. They pledged to, “create greater interoperability between our defence forces and deepen cooperation on procurement and capabilities.” This included strengthening cooperation on counter-terrorism issues. They also agreed to, “work toward a reinvigorated Commonwealth.” In conclusion, the leaders stated, “We commit ourselves and our governments to achieve what we have set out in this declaration to collaborate on our commerce, foreign policy, defence, security, development and intelligence relationship.” In a move which some have criticized as a step backwards, Canada has re-established the connection between the monarchy and its military by renaming Maritime Command and Air Command back to the former titles of Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force.

In September, Canada’s Defense Minister Peter MacKay was in Australia and New Zealand for separate meetings to further build bilateral security relations in the Asia-Pacific region. While in Australia, he met with several ministers where, “they discussed defence reform, procurement practices, general Asia-Pacific defence issues, and the transformation of the Australian Defence department.” Minister Mackay, “emphasized the strong military ties between both Australia and Canada and Canada’s ongoing interests in the Asia-Pacific region.” During his trip to New Zealand, Mackay met with his counterpart and discussed, “the state of current defence operations, defence reform and procurement.” The meetings in both countries were, “an opportunity to deepen Canada-Australia and Canada-New Zealand bilateral ties, to discuss military operations and defence transformation, and to exchange views on regional and international matters of operational and strategic importance.” This is part of Canada’s ongoing efforts to further expand its global influence and it could be directed against China who has gained much power in the region.

While in the past Canada has exercised a more independent foreign policy, in many ways, it has now succumbed to the imperialistic aspirations of the U.S. and NATO. The war in Afghanistan and the continued bombing in Libya have demonstrated Canada’s willingness to use military force to advance foreign policy. It appears as if they have also turned back the clock by further embracing the monarchy and renewing its strategic partnership with Britain and the Commonwealth at large. Under the influence of a declining Anglo-American Empire, Canada has shed its peacekeeping image in favor of a more aggressive and militaristic doctrine. In the coming years, Canada will be expected to contribute even more to global security including participation in future U.S.-NATO military operations.

An overnight curfew was lifted on Monday but scores of people have been arrested, and a heavy security presence remained on the streets near Tahrir Square (the iconic landmark that witnessed the glorious days of the Egyptian revolution).

Sunday clashes followed Egypt Christians (Copts) protests over the recent destruction of a church near the southern town of Aswan, but actually there was more to these protests than just another case of demolishing or setting a church on fire (this was the third incidence in a row, of demolishing Coptic churches, in less than 8 months after Mubarak was toppled).

Barely a few weeks to the first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections and after months of political debate and turmoil, it has become obvious that the Muslim Brotherhood and the ultra-conservative Islamists (Salafists) are bound to gain the lead in the upcoming vote, thus devouring the biggest chunk of the next parliament seats and tightening their grip over the legislative house.

And since the Islamists front, which obviously struck some sort of a deal with the military, has made no secret of their intention to apply the Islamic Sharia law that could undermine the citizenry of the Copts and reduce them to second class citizens, the Coptic community grew not only insecure but also frightened of the perilous prospects of a gloomy future.

So the thousands of Copts in Sunday’s rally were not expressing their anger over the demolition of yet another church; rather, they were expressing their fears over threatened belonging and identity and over the failure of the interim government to protect them and their places of worship.

Never throughout the 1400 years of co-habitation with Muslims in Egypt had any church or monastery been attacked before.  That’s why this whole new cycle of persecution and discrimination against the Christian minority has been a very alarming precedent for all the Coptic community in Egypt.

What went wrong?

Copts of Egypt are enduring through threatened identity crisis for years now.

Many no doubt wondered what on earth had happened to the celebrated Tahrir revolution of civility, nonviolence and solidarity as they watched the violent late collisions between Egypt Copts and the soldiers of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF).

Disturbing scenes certainly, but they were neither unexpected nor totally spontaneous as some like to portray them. In the historical course of most revolutions, moments of exceptional unity and sacrifice do not last long. Once the common enemy is gone, unity gives way to the reassertion of differences and sectarian interests; old coalitions collapse, new solidarities and ideological differences emerge and even plots and schemes by another enemy begin to play out.

At such times of political instability, the challenge, of course, is how to handle the old demarcations and emerging differences. In post-Mubarak Egypt, the rise of radical Islamists, a security vacuum and sectarian violence have always been the most feared obstacles to a smooth transition to a democratically elected government, whatever that means.

But with SCAF siding with the Islamist front while dragging its feet on getting the police forces back on the Egyptian street and properly functioning again, the Christian minority (10% of the Egyptian population) remains in limbo.

Copts in history

Egyptian Christianity, of course, predates Islam – which was brought by the Arab conquest of Egypt in 639 AD, and became the majority religion. Some Egyptians embraced Islam voluntarily for its promise of justice, many did so to avoid jizya (taxes) while still others to acquire equal social and political status with Muslims.

By the 10th century, Muslims outnumbered the Christian population, and Arabic replaced the Coptic language as the official governmental language. In the 12th century, the church adopted Arabic as the official clergical language.

“Like or not, we are the true landowners,” yelled the protesting copts.

Hardline Copts, in exile and at home, consider themselves a distinct ethnicity – with a unique ancestry, religion and way of life – that are now being treated as a second class population and suggest, moreover, that they are, in fact, the “true, original Egyptians.”

With that hardline concept and reasoning in mind that the Copts never dared or allowed, if you will, to take it outside the church premises, the Coptic protesters in their Sunday march defiantly roared, “Like or not, we are the true land owners.”

This was the first time for Egypt Copts to let go of their prudence and discretion and maybe also their long buried hostility.  Frustrated by SCAF lax handling of the violence and frequent targeting of the Coptic churches, and since no one was prosecuted or held accountable for the previous two attacks, the Copts set off this huge rally with a bit of a grudge against SCAF.

Left out

In Egypt today, the key responsibility to ensure sectarian peace lies with the country’s elite (the military council, the intelligentsia, the remnants of Mubarak’s regime, Islamists, and Coptic leaders) … and, of course, regional and international players, namely Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel.

As for the intelligentsia and the liberals who have being outweighed by the rise of the well organized and obscenely financed Islamists, thanks to the Wahabbist Saudis, and are so busy and exhausted trying to secure, by any stretch, the minimum number of parliament seats even if that meant some secret deal with the Muslim brotherhood, they actually have no time for the Copts’ dossier.

The Coptic leaders, feeling insecure after Mubarak’s stepping down and also feeling left out while the Islamists and the remnants of the old regime split the booty of the transitional period, had no choice but to consider asking, or, rather, begging for international protection, an option long advocated by hardline Copts in exile especially in the United States and aided by Zionist organizations … and that required nothing more than some bloody confrontation with the Egyptian security forces during which Coptic victims would fall down in front of the whole world.

Judging from the latest statements of SCAF in which they explicitly announced that the council will not approve of a civilian president to be the future supreme commander of the military forces and with Field Marshal Tantawy insinuating that he might consider running for the presidency, we can understand SCAF’s need for more escalation of riots and unrest as a pretext to sort of prolonging the interim period for may be another two years during which they could cling to power and shift the country into military rule.

For the time being, both the United States and Israel prefer the military council being in command rather than to hand over the rule of Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood with their known pro-Palestine agenda and their unpredictable stance on the Camp David peace accords, even if that means turning a blind eye to SCAF security forces getting so out of control as to run over peaceful protesters with their armored vehicles exactly as Mubarak’s security apparatus used to do.

False flag

When it comes to Egypt, the Israeli role doesn’t stop at the wishful thinking of an observer but extends into deep and covert involvement. I mean, we all remember the state of bewilderment and confusion that followed the Alexandria church bombing last Christmas night that left around 20 dead and 90 wounded, but the classified documents found in the headquarters of the raided state security apparatus proved that the whole thing was a false flag operation pulled to implicate some Gaza-based militants and help Israel tighten its siege on Gaza and incriminate Hamas as a terrorist organization.

What is similarly puzzling about the peaceful Coptic march that suddenly turned violent is the testimony of various eyewitnesses that confirmed that plain-clothed unknown assailants managed to infiltrate the rally and on reaching the final destination of the march they were the ones who started throwing stones, Molotov cocktail bottles and even shooting live ammunition at the military security forces taking down two soldiers — and from then on the scene turned into the chaos and violence we have all witnessed.

Obviously those were trained agent provocateurs that easily infiltrated the peaceful Coptic march and orchestrated this whole mess. What consolidates this thesis is the swift and widespread rumor that followed on the internet social media and on the Egyptian street stating that Hillary Clinton, the American foreign secretary, has declared that the United States is willing to help the Egyptian military council to protect the Christian minority in Egypt.

Of course, the next day this breaking news was refuted as false statement, but still this whole thing, regardless of the hidden motives of both the Copts and the Egyptian military, smells so much like a false flag.

During his speech at a recent meeting of northern border states, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told participants that the U.S. and Canada are set to launch a pilot project next year which will allow law enforcement officers to operate on both sides of the border. Holder explained that, “the creation of ‘NextGen’ teams of cross-designated officers would allow us to more effectively identify, assess, and interdict persons and organizations involved in transnational crime.” He went on to say, “In conjunction with the other provisions included in the Beyond the Border Initiative, such a move would enhance our cross-border efforts and advance our information-sharing abilities.” The declaration, Beyond the Border: Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness issued by President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper last February, identified joint law enforcement operations and information sharing as a high priority. There are already examples of what we could expect from a security perimeter as some Canadians have been denied entry into the U.S. after their records of mental illness were shared with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

While further details of the new joint law enforcement project are not yet available, Stuart Trew of the Council of Canadians pointed out that the plans are well advanced. This prompted him to question, “why is Harper consulting with Canadians on a done deal? We haven’t had a chance to yea or nay the perimeter agreement which is expected to be released as an ‘action plan’ within weeks. But a pilot project that legalizes and normalizes US policing activities in Canada is already set to begin next year.” He added that this confirms, “the Harper government will use its limited public consultations earlier this year to move ahead quickly with whatever new cross-border policing and information sharing commitments it wants, regardless of privacy and other concerns.” Last month, the Canadian government released two reports which summarized public input received concerning regulatory cooperation, as well as security and trade across the border. While improving the movement of goods and people was the priority for business groups, many individuals expressed concerns over the loss of sovereignty, along with the protection of personal information.

On top of announcing plans to create teams of cross-designated officers, Attorney General Eric Holder took time to praise bilateral relations between the two countries, but acknowledged, “there are areas in which the U.S. and Canada can enhance cooperation in criminal investigations and prosecutions. And I believe we must consider how extradition, and mutual legal assistance, processes could be streamlined.” He also stated, “As Canada’s national government considers various anti-crime policies and approaches, we will continue working to implement a comprehensive anti-crime framework.” Does this mean that as part of a security perimeter, Canada would have to change its legal system to better reflect U.S. laws? As the fall session of Parliament gets underway, the Harper government is set to table tough new criminal reform legislation.

In the report entitled Shared Vision or Myopia: The Politics of Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness, former Foreign Service officer Gar Pardy warns that a perimeter security deal with the U.S. could sacrifice Canadians privacy while doing nothing to improve the flow of trade across the border. In his report, Pardy reveals that “The concessions the Americans want is the transfer of enormous amounts of information about Canadians and others about whom Canada collects information. It is evident that to meet such expectations Canadian privacy laws will need to be ignored, violated or weakened.” He also stated that, “The Shared Vision approach essentially promotes the idea that in order to restore the status quo ante implicit in the free trade agreements there have to be large political concessions by Canada that will satisfy American security concerns.” This could explain the Conservative government’s announcement that it will reintroduce anti-terrorism measures which have expired and are on par with sections of the liberty-stripping U.S. Patriot Act. The move is tied to plans for a security perimeter and is aimed more at satisfying U.S. fears.

In his report released by the Rideau Institute, Gar Pardy also warns that, “when Canada–United States privacy protection principles are under bilateral discussion, privacy protection will not be increased. A more likely result is that existing Canadian privacy laws, as flawed as they are, will erode to meet the demands of the United States.” As part of his report, he recommended measures that would better protect privacy rights and encourage transparency. This included all new agreements with the U.S. affecting the privacy rights of Canadians, be reviewed by the Privacy Commissioner. Pardy called for the creation of a single authority to oversee all federal police and security organizations participating in information transfers between both countries. He also recommended a separate treaty that would protect personal information transferred to the U.S. for national security purposes. With regards to a perimeter security deal, Pardy concluded that, “If Canadian concessions on security and privacy rules do result in the lessening of American border restrictions and controls then such results would always be hostage to future events over which Canada has no control.”

It is important to keep in mind that the move towards a North American security perimeter is being done without congressional or parliamentary approval. There is no reason to trust that our governments will strike any kind of balance between security and freedom. That is why it is imperative that we demand more transparency and input. With a joint action plan expected to be released soon, it is my hope that Canadians and Americans will reject any perimeter security deal that reduces privacy rights and further puts our sovereignty at risk.

Somebody would spill the beans, right? In fact, a number of us tried. Media watchers should savvy up, as the air waves get blitzed this weekend with 9/11 memorials. If the corporate media had done its job as a watch dog, the world would have got an earful of reliable intelligence sources debunking the official 9/11 story.

Unhappily, the corporate media has been a co-conspirator in the 9/11 Cover Up from day one. They have actively abetted the government with its dirty work. Say a truth teller got arrested on the Patriot Act—like me— and locked in prison on a military base, while the public debate raged over 9/11 and Iraq without access to knowledgeable sources. The government could rely on corporate media to squash the story, while the Justice Department fought my demands for a trial, playing every dirty trick in the book to stop a New York jury from hearing testimony about 9/11 and Iraq.

My nightmare is described in “Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq”. It was a frightening ordeal with secret charges, secret evidence, secret grand jury testimony, and threats of indefinite detention on a Texas military base.

However, the Patriot Act by itself was not enough to silence facts about the command failure before 9/11 or Iraqi Pre-War Intelligence. Over and over, friends and colleagues reached out to the corporate media, delivering independent confirmations about my 9/11 warnings, the Iraqi peace framework and my work on the Lockerbie case, which proved my status as an Asset. Supporters pleaded for the media’s help to expose the government’s manipulations, so I could get my day in court, and bring that truth to the people.

Over and over again, the corporate media in New York, itself, mounted a wall of silence to buttress America’s leaders.

Most New Yorkers and New Jersey residents would be appalled to discover that the worst media whore in the 9/11 Cover Up turned out to be the New York Times.

By May, 2004, the New York Times received no fewer than four confirmations of our Intelligence team’s 9/11 warnings to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Office of Counter-Terrorism at the Justice Department. Confirmation was made six months before release of the 9/11 Commission report, when public discussion could have impacted the findings. Most importantly, a discourse of the facts about 9/11 would have educated voters before the November 2004 elections, holding leaders in Washington accountable to the people. For this reason, I offered to waive my Fifth Amendment rights under indictment, so the 9/11 Commission could take my testimony under oath.

Most critically, the New York Times gained two of those all important confirmations about the 9/11 warnings from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Both of my handlers, Dr. Richard Fuisz and Paul Hoven, men freely volunteered our 9/11 warnings and the Iraqi Peace option to the New York Times. They also explained my work as a U.S. intelligence Asset engaged in the Lockerbie negotiations with Libya, and my role spearheading talks to resume weapons inspections with Iraqi Ambassador Dr. Saeed Hasan. The journalist, David Samuels, called me excitedly, after the interviews.

You read that correctly. The CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency both gave information about the 9/11 warnings to the New York Times, expecting the newspaper to alert its readers of the command negligence before the attack. The New York Times‘ readership was most personally impacted by the tragedy, after all. They made an effort to inspire discussion while the 9/11 Commission was hearing testimony. The New York Times acquired two more confirmations of our 9/11 warnings from Dr. Parke Godfrey, a highly respected computer science professor of York University in Toronto, and my brother, John Lindauer of Los Angeles.

That took guts for the Intelligence Community. By this time, writing was on the wall that Republican Leaders would punish anyone who spoke against them.

One would expect the New York Times to rush to press with such a hot story. Think about it: a long-time U.S. Intelligence Asset, second cousin to President Bush’s Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, warns about 9/11 and has full knowledge of Iraq’s cooperation with the 9/11 Investigation — then gets arrested on the Patriot Act, after requesting to testify before Congress.

Wasn’t that newsworthy? Not according to the editors of the New York Times. Instead of objectively reporting independent confirmations of the 9/11 warnings and properly identifying me as an Asset, the New York Times engaged in gross public fraud. They abetted the government in concealing information of critical significance to the paper’s home town. They manipulated the people of New York City into believing the CIA gave no advance warnings of 9/11 at all. While the American public screamed for impeachment, the New York Times blocked information that showed President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez engaged in active public deception. The people were left believing the government had simply made mistakes before 9/11 and the Iraq War.

In other words, the New York Times acted like an old whore, clinging to GOP leaders like a last client, seeking assurances of her waning attractiveness to the public.

When one of Washington’s most stellar attorneys, Brian Shaughnessy, forced the Court to grant my request for a single, pre-trial hearing—four years after my arrest—Parke Godfrey delivered shocking testimony about my 9/11 warnings less than a thousand feet from where the World Trade Center once graced the New York skyline.

Yet again, New York Times reporter, Alan Feuer, fraudulently and libelously invented a phony lead sentence: “She stuck her tongue out at the prosecutor.” And the New York Times parroted the Justice Department’s line that “half a dozen psychiatrists” had declared me incompetent to stand trial—a blatant deception. Ignoring a morning’s worth of testimony, Feuer suggested that I was a “religious maniac,” something hysterically funny to everyone who knows me. There’s no reality contact in the one and only psychiatric report that postulated such claims. (That single evaluation was presented by the Justice Department’s psychiatrist and tossed by the Bureau of Prisons in the first hour of my arrival at Carswell).

If the New York Times had scratched the surface in its reporting, journalists would have recognized the Justice Department was running what’s called “a psy-op” designed to hide major government deceptions from voters. A quick examination of the record would have revealed that half a dozen psychiatrists had challenged the Justice Department, and declared me fully competent in all areas of life. Even psychiatrists at Carswell Prison acknowledged I suffered “no evidence of hallucinations,” “no depression.” They said I socialized well, posed “zero behavioral problems.” Weekly reports stated consistently that I was “cooperative, smiling, with good eye contact.”

Notably, psychiatrists at Carswell Prison ruled out delusional disorder, citing first-hand observation, witness interviews, and diagnostic testing.

The slightest attention to witness testimonials would have exposed the whole public fraud. Yet the New York media carefully ignored evidentiary testimony that exposed the 9/11 warnings and denied symptoms of mental instability. While my attorney, Brian Shaughnessy, protested for my right to a trial, the New York media assured the public that the Court finding was “gift wrapped for my defense.”

Casting journalists as “controlled opposition” might be overly generous given these circumstances, since it implies they have any backbone at all. Alas, most of them don’t. They whine for pity for their low ratings. Then they let government officials write their news scripts in exchange for political access.

Hey, it’s a tough job defending the official story of 9/11. You have to overcome janitorial crews, fire fighters and emergency rescue teams who all reported hearing explosions pop through the towers. They had to ignore damage to the front lobby— windows that exploded before the first plane hit the building.

You have to ignore what your own eyes see—a neat, clean, controlled demolition of the Towers, which dropped free-fall into a pile of thermatic dust — and fires that burned under the Towers until December, months after jet fuel would have gasped its last flame.

Airplanes crashed into the Towers that day, sure enough. However, I can testify myself the U.S. had significant advance warnings about the airplane hijackings, back to April and May, 2001. The decision to go to War with Iraq, in the aftermath of the terrorist strike, was already made “at the highest levels of government above the CIA Director and Secretary of State.” I know that firsthand, because I was instructed to deliver that message, precisely worded, to Iraqi diplomats, and to demand “any fragment of actionable intelligence that would pinpoint the attack.” And I did so.

Iraq had no intelligence. However, the CIA’s advance knowledge of the conspiracy and advance threats against Iraq created powerful motivation and opportunity for a separate orphan team, domestic or foreign, to wire the Towers with military grade explosives.

The New York media never investigated reports that security cameras in the parking garage had photographed mysterious trucks/vans arriving at the World Trade Center at about 3 a.m and departing at 5 a.m, before Type AAA personalities arrived to start their days on Wall Street. The vans were different than the janitorial trucks in make, model and decal. They arrived at the World Trade Center from August 23 to September 3.

Those are important missing pieces of how the 9/11 tragedy unfolded. Myself, I have concluded that airplane hijackings were used as a public cover for a controlled demolition of the Twin Towers and Building 7. From that point, it’s up to explosives experts to determine the sorts of materials applied to the detonation.

I won my freedom when the blogs and alternative radio took up my cause. In a practical sense, 9/11 marked the changing of the media guard. And it proved the internet boasts some fine journalists of its own, like Michael Collins and radio host Bob Tuskin at The Intel Hub.

No thanks to the government’s top dogs at the New York Times. But perhaps that’s not fair. A dog would have shown more loyalty to the people of Manhattan and New Jersey.

That memoir was titled Fugitive Days and was written by former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers.  It would become the fodder for a fight by the fascist right to put us all under their boot.  It was a fight that would be joined by cowering liberals and Democrats across the country.  The targets were the gains made by blacks, Latinos, women, gays and others during the 1960s.  It was the anti-imperialist understanding brought about by years of opposing the US war on Vietnam.  In his memoir, Bill Ayers did not express the proper type of regret.  Indeed, instead of regretting the actions of the Weather Underground and other militants in the antiwar movement of the Sixties, Ayers regretted that these folks did not do more to stop the US aggression in southeast Asia.

Very few New Yorkers in Manhattan had a chance to read the New York Times review of that book that day.  Most may have been on their second cup of coffee when the planes begin flying into the Towers.  If they were reading anything, it was a newspaper front page, their morning emails or a sports section.  I was getting ready to go back to Vermont after spending a couple days and nights with my friend A. My secondary (and somewhat ironic) reason for visiting Manhattan had been to speak about the history and meaning of political violence as practiced by those opposed to the state.  After kissing A. goodbye before she caught the bus for her job near Canal Street, I packed my bag, left her a note and headed out the door of her apartment building.  She lived between 9th and 10th Avenue.  As I approached the corner of 9th Ave., I noticed a rather large crowd of people looking south.  Naturally, my head turned that way, too.  There was a plane stuck in the tower and smoke was billowing forth.

While my mind attempted to assimilate what I was seeing, another plane crashed into the other tower.  An African-American guy that always hung out this corner listening to his boom box and asking for change said it all: “Holy shit!”  The crowd concurred.  I figured that I would not be leaving Manhattan that day.  I returned to A’s apartment and called the airlines.  All flights canceled.  I returned to the corner just in time to see the first tower collapse.

I walked east toward a Radio Shack store.  My plan was to buy a small transistor radio and walk south listening to the news as I walked.  Every single bar and restaurant along the street had set their television either on the sidewalk or in the front window and were broadcasting the unfolding events.  People walked by curious, shocked and scared.  I went into the second bar and ordered a beer.  I needed time to think about this.  The sound of sirens was now everywhere.  School buses filled with soldiers and cops were parking on 23rd Street, their passengers emptying out, receiving orders from their commanders and assuming various positions around the city.  While I waited for the beer, the second tower collapsed on the television and several blocks south from where I was.

A man dressed in several layers of clothing stood in the doorway and repeated that it was not the end of the world.  The Lord, he said, was giving us another chance to get along.  The bartender said fuck getting along, he wanted revenge.  I agreed with the guy in the doorway but said nothing.  I asked the bartender for some food and he called back into the kitchen.  Minutes later, he delivered a meatball sub and another beer.  The fellow in the doorway had moved on to the next open door.  Nobody bothered him and nobody ignored him.  New Yorkers were willing to listen to anyone who might explain what was happening in their city.

The sirens were louder and continuous.  People from the scene of the destruction were beginning to appear in the Chelsea neighborhood having made their way up from southern Manhattan.  None of these folks were saying much and some were visibly distraught.  I couldn’t help thinking that this was what the US military had done to to other peoples multiple times just in my lifetime.  Of course, I kept that thought to myself, knowing that expressing it was tantamount to asking for a beating.  After my second beer I decided to see if I could get into the Port Authority terminal.  Maybe I could get a bus out of here by tomorrow.  As I walked north, various people walked by.  Many were going about their business, but everyone with sight was keeping an eye on the activity south of them.

War was on the horizon.  Someone would pay for this mess, even if they weren’t responsible.  Bill Ayers and others willing to express their opinions against US imperialism would end up being among them, although they might not see it that way.  I finally ran into A. in Washington Square Park.  We hugged each other with visible relief and went to buy a beer or two.  After wards, we sat in the park listening, talking, watching, and smelling the chemical toxins released by the burning buildings.  Eventually, a peace circle was formed and people sang a couple songs.  Some frat boys threw epithets and rocks at the circle, demanding an immediate attack on someone, somewhere.  Meanwhile, anybody who looked like they hailed from the Middle East or Central Asia made themselves scarce.

By the time I was able to leave Manhattan two days later, the US government was rounding up men from those areas of the world and locking them up.  I had to show my ID three times before I boarded the train back to Vermont.  I had never shown it once in all of my previous train trips.  The police and military presence in Penn Station and on train platforms along the route reminded me of being in West Germany in 1972 during the first round of urban warfare by the Red Army Fraktion.

The roundups continued and an omnibus law that had obviously been sitting somewhere in the national security state’s bureau was passed almost unanimously.  That law is known as the PATRIOT Act and did more to restrict human and civil rights in the United States than any other law passed in the previous fifty years.  We have grown used to its restrictions, just like we have grown used to wars that never end.  To pretend that wars of aggression and false security prevents political attacks on a system designed to dominate the world is more than folly.  It is suicidal.

It certainly can’t hurt when the U.S. Fifth Fleet has the back of those doing the killing, or when the killers are pampered ne’er-do-wells, a fabulously wealthy clique of hereditary princes for whom the word “medieval” was invented, who just so happen to lord over one of the planet’s financial bolt holes.

Last month, Bloomberg Markets Magazine revealed that when “Bahraini jailers armed with stiff rubber hoses” beat 39-year-old school administrator and human rights activist Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar in a windowless dungeon in Manama, his jailers were armed “with another kind of weapon: transcripts of his text messages and details from personal mobile phone conversations.”

“It was amazing,” Al Khanjar told investigative journalists Vernon Silver and Ben Elgin. “How did they know about these?”

The answer is simple: from computers loaded with spy kit sold to Bahraini royals “by Siemens AG (SIE), and maintained by Nokia Siemens Networks and NSN’s divested unit, Trovicor GmbH, according to two people whose positions at the companies gave them direct knowledge of the installations.”

Back in February, political floodgates opened across the Middle East as American-allied dictators were toppled by enraged citizens in Tunisia and Egypt, and threatened to do the same in Bahrain when pro-democracy demonstrators took to the streets across the island nation.

The Al Khalifa clan responded as royals are wont to do: with brute force and considerable help from U.S. and Saudi “friends.” Scores were killed and many hundreds of others, including medical personnel, were seized and “disappeared” into regime black holes.

As The Guardian reported, while “Bahrain’s security forces are the backbone of the Al Khalifa regime,” in recent years “large numbers of their personnel are recruited from other countries, including Jordan, Pakistan and Yemen” and “are reviled as mercenaries by Bahrainis.”

But what of the gaggle of Western firms who hit the “sweet spot” selling despotic potentates everything from high-tech spy gear to machine guns and lethal gases: will they be “reviled as mercenaries” by media in the “democratic” West?

‘Institutionalized Corruption’

It’s hardly surprising that one of Siemens offloaded intelligence units, Trovicor, did a brisk business with Bahrain’s secret state. After all, considering the firm’s dubious track record and a corporate culture where “bribery was just a line item” according to The New York Times, why wouldn’t they?

More than two years ago when a spate of corruption prosecutions were settled, Siemens wound up paying some $1.6 billion to the U.S. government under provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, “the largest fine for bribery in modern corporate history.”

Former mid-level executive, Reinhard Siekaczek, told reporters Siri Schubert and T. Christian Miller that “he was one of several people who arranged a torrent of payments that eventually streamed to well-placed officials around the globe, from Vietnam to Venezuela and from Italy to Israel.”

“What is striking about Mr. Siekaczek’s and prosecutors’ accounts of those dealings,” the Times averred, “which flowed through a web of secret bank accounts and shadowy consultants, is how entrenched corruption had become at a sprawling, sophisticated corporation that externally embraced the nostrums of a transparent global marketplace built on legitimate transactions.”

The former executive said that between “2002 to 2006 he oversaw an annual bribery budget of about $40 million to $50 million at Siemens. Company managers and sales staff used the slush fund to cozy up to corrupt government officials worldwide.”

“Bribery was Siemens’s business model,” Uwe Dolata, the spokesman for the association of federal criminal investigators in Germany told the Times. “Siemens had institutionalized corruption.”

Such lucrative inducements to officials were meant to maintain the firm’s “competitive edge” overseas in the branch Siekaczek oversaw, “which sold telecommunications equipment.”

High-tech accouterments which ended up in the hands of Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar’s torturers.

Ahmed Aldoseri, the director of information and communications technologies at Bahrain’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority told Bloomberg Markets, “If they have a transcript of an SMS message, it’s because the security organ was monitoring the user at their monitoring center.”

Inquiring minds can’t help but wonder: did black euros flowing through one of Siemens slush funds grease the palms of corrupt interior ministry officials and then quietly vanish into an offshore bank controlled by cronies of Bahrain’s hereditary royals?

A Global Hidey-Hole

Faced with depleting oil and gas reserves, Bahrain’s industrial base has expanded rapidly over the past two decades and includes petrochemical, aluminum, oil refining, ship repairing and light manufacturing; it’s share of GDP from these sectors, compared to other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), is the highest in the region.

However, “liberal” banking regulations, secrecy laws and a sophisticated telecommunications infrastructure have attracted major Asian and Western institutional investors and investment banks. Drawn by the country’s reputation as a no tax zone for foreigners and a freewheeling “no questions asked” regulatory climate, Bahrain is a haven for hot money.

A secret embassy cable published by WikiLeaks, 06MANAMA2003, informs us that “Bahrain has one of the most diversified economies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).”

Accordingly, “Bahrain has promoted itself as an international financial center in the Gulf region. It hosts a mix of: 375 diverse financial institutions, including 187 banks, of which 51 are wholesale banks (formerly referred to as off-shore banks or OBUs); 39 investment banks; and 25 commercial banks, of which 17 are foreign-owned. There are 31 representative offices of international banks.”

Situated in the heart of the Middle East where the global oil trade recycles regional wealth into liquidity for financial markets, Bahrain and the other Gulf monarchies as they diversify into offshore finance, intersect and capture enormous outflows of cash hemorrhaging out of Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, steering hot money into hidey-holes for those in the know. Therefore, mass mobilizations in favor of messy things like democracy would hardly inspire confidence in the global owning class.

Nicholas Shaxson, the author of Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens, tells us that offshore tax havens such as Bahrain’s “are not exotic, murky sideshows at the fringes of the world economy: they lie at its centre. Half of world trade flows, at least on paper, through tax havens. Every multinational corporation uses them routinely. The biggest users of tax havens by far are not terrorists, spivs [black marketeers], celebrities or Mafiosi–but banks.”

“Tax havens aren’t just about tax,” Shaxson writes. “They are about escape–escape from criminal laws, escape from creditors, escape from tax, escape from prudent financial regulation–above all, escape from democratic scrutiny and accountability. Tax havens get rich by taking fees for providing these escape routes. This is their core line of business. It is what they do.”

“The vast network of Bahrain’s banking system,” the State Department informs us, “along with its geographical location in the Middle East as a transit point along the Gulf and into Southwest Asia, may attract money laundering activities. It is thought that the greatest risk of money laundering stems from questionable foreign proceeds that transit Bahrain.”

And, like Siemens, which “had joined the international convention banning foreign bribery” in 1999, according to the State Department, “in 2001, the Government of Bahrain (GOB) enacted an anti-money laundering law that criminalizes the laundering of proceeds derived from any predicate offense.”

Presumably that law, and a 2006 amendment which criminalized “the undeclared transfer of money across international borders for the purpose of money laundering or in support of terrorism,” would also cover bribing state officials for purposes, let’s say, of sweetening the pot for purchases of “telecommunications equipment,” including surveillance suites targeting dissident Bahrainis.

Also in 2006, Bahrain implemented a Free Trade Agreement with the United States to go along with its status as a global offshore financial center. As a result, the organized workers’ movement has been targeted by the government.

According to the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), “authorities in Bahrain are stepping up repression of the country’s trade union movement, with further suspensions and sackings of workers due to their actual or suspected participation in trade union and political actions earlier this year.”

Since the pro-democracy uprising began, BCHR informs us that “some 2,600 workers” affiliated with the General Federation of Bahraini Trade Unions (GFBTU), “in both the public and private sector have been fired, with an additional 361 workers suspended. Despite numerous promises to the contrary, the government has largely failed to reinstate workers illegally dismissed.”

It’s a sure bet that the same surveillance gear used in wholesale raids against human rights’ campaigners have also been trained upon Bahraini workers’ organizations, proving once again that “free trade” means “freedom” to smash trade unions.

U.S. and Bahraini Intelligence: Thick as Thieves

Bahrain is home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, the proverbial tip of imperialism’s nautical spear responsible for naval operations in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and the east coast of Africa as far south as Kenya.

And should the Obama administration, their Israeli pit bulls, or both, decide to up the ante with Iran, the Fifth Fleet would be called upon, as they were at the start of Bush’s “shock and awe” campaign which destroyed Iraq, to launch air strikes and impose a naval blockade against that oil-rich nation.

Given Bahrain’s strategic importance to Washington, and the regime’s close links to the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus, Madame Clinton’s expression of “deep concern” when security forces attacked unarmed protesters was the emptiest of gestures meant to divert the public’s gaze from the criminal role played by the U.S. government during Bahrain’s targeting of the pro-democracy movement.

This is borne out by secret embassy cables published by WikiLeaks. A December 2, 2009 communiqué from the American Embassy in Manama to former CIA Director Leon Panetta and then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, 09MANAMA681, informs us that “Director of BNSA [Bahrain National Security Agency] Sheikh Khalifa bin Abdallah Al Khalifa figures prominently into the King’s efforts on reform and stability.”

According to U.S. Ambassador J. Adam Ereli, “charged by the King to ‘Bahrainize’ and professionalize BNSA, Sheikh Khalifa is determined to rid BNSA of the last vestiges of British influence and grow BNSA into a world-class intelligence and security service with global reach.”

“The secret police–the Bahrain national security agency, known in Arabic as the Mukhabarat–has undergone a process of ‘Bahrainisation’ in recent years after being dominated by the British until long after independence in 1971,” The Guardian disclosed.

“Ian Henderson, who retired as its director in 1998, is still remembered as the ‘Butcher of Bahrain’ because of his alleged use of torture. A Jordanian official is currently described as the organisation’s ‘master torturer’.”

“Sheikh Khalifa” according to the State Department, “understands well that if he is to fulfill his mandate of protecting Bahrain, he must ‘go deep’ and develop robust intelligence liaison relationships with partners around the world.”

“To that end,” Ereli writes, “he has embarked on a program to establish and strengthen intelligence ties abroad, with a central focus on counterterrorism. Against this backdrop, Sheikh Khalifa unabashedly positions his relationship with the U.S. Intelligence Community above all others, insisting that his key lieutenants communicate openly with their U.S. liaison partners and actively seek new avenues for cooperation.”

Would an imperative to “communicate openly” and jointly pursue “new areas for cooperation” extend to U.S. training of Bahraini spooks in myriad aspects of electronic and signals intelligence, the better to more fully exploit technologies supplied by America’s NATO partner, Germany?

Exporting Repression

Three years ago, I reported on a highly-intrusive communications intelligence system which New Scientist drolly dubbed “surveillance in a box.” (See: “New Spy Software Coming On-Line: ‘Surveillance in a Box’ Makes its Debut,” Antifascist Calling, August 28, 2008)

According to reporter Laura Margottini, Siemens had developed software capable of integrating “tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines, pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs “intelligence modules”.

“In Bahrain,” Bloomberg Markets reported, “officials routinely use surveillance in the arrest and torture of political opponents, according to Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights.”

Rajab told Silver and Elgin that “he has evidence of this from former detainees, including Al Khanjar, and their lawyers and family members.”

“Everyone was interrogated based on telephone calls that were checked–and not only us, the activists,” Rajab said. “Even our children, our wives, our sisters are being monitored.”

We learned that Siemens had already sold the devilish system to more than 60 Asian, European and Middle Eastern nations, including world-class human rights abusers. Which countries? Well, Siemens won’t say.

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, the European privacy watchdog group Quintessenz, published a series of leaked internal documents and presentations made by Siemens for prospective customers.

And while those documents and are startling, in the three years since they were first published, these products have become far more invasive.

Specifically designed for “fusion centers” or their Asian, European and Middle Eastern equivalents, the Intelligence Platform claims it can deliver “real time” intelligence for the hot “lawful interception” market.

As Bloomberg Markets reported, the use of the system by Bahraini police “illustrates how Western-produced surveillance technology sold to one authoritarian government became an investigative tool of choice to gather information about political dissidents–and silence them.”

“Some industry insiders,” Silver and Elgin wrote, “now say their own products have become dangerous in the hands of regimes where law enforcement crosses the line to repression.”

One such insider, Nikhil Gyamlani, told reporters that when he worked as a consultant for Trovicor and Nokia Siemens, the firm “had developed monitoring systems and sold them to some of the countries” on the cutting edge of the Arab Spring.

“Besides Bahrain,” Bloomberg Markets reports, “several other Middle Eastern nations that cracked down on uprisings this year–including Egypt, Syria and Yemen–also purchased monitoring centers from the chain of businesses now known as Trovicor.”

And “Trovicor equipment,” Silver and Elgin averred, “plays a surveillance role in at least 12 Middle Eastern and North African nations, according to the two people familiar with the installations.”

During the Bahraini uprising, “authorities jammed or restricted communications to stymie gatherings and knew where to send riot police before a protest could even start, according to eyewitness reports.”

“For that to happen,” Gyamlani told Bloomberg, “government officials had to have some means of figuring out where to go or whom to target to nip protests in the bud.”

“Across the Middle East in recent years,” Silver and Elgin averred, “sales teams at Siemens, Nokia Siemens, Munich-based Trovicor and other companies have worked their connections among spy masters, police chiefs and military officers to provide country after country with monitoring gear.”

Since Nokia Siemens first unveiled the system, updates “allow more than the interception of phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Voice Over Internet Protocol calls such as those made using Skype.”

“The monitoring systems,” Silver and Elgin wrote, “can scan communications for key words or recognize voices and then feed the data and recordings to operators at government agencies.”

According to Bloomberg Markets, “some products can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices. They can change the contents of written communications in mid-transmission, use voice recognition to scan phone networks, and pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones.”

In other words, not only can Trovicor’s Intelligence Platform spy on political dissidents, it can also fabricate communications thereby setting-up activists for more serious charges, particularly when authorities (falsely) accuse protest organizers of “fomenting violence” through messages they’ve artfully invented themselves.

One no longer need insert agents provocateurs into proscribed groups. With the Intelligence Platform one can spread disinformation or incite violence from the safety and security of a monitoring center. Think of the savings to security budgets in these deficit conscious times!

“Offshoring” the Security World

As Bloomberg Markets revealed, when Siemens and Nokia unloaded their spy unit, they turned to the offshore world and found an eager buyer in “the Guernsey-based Perusa Partners Fund 1 LP” who “renamed the business Trovicor, coined from the Latin and Esperanto words for find and heart.”

Perusa Partners Fund 1 LP is an odd duck to say the least. Their web site informs us that “the fund we counsel is not listed on the stock exchange and is thus able to act independently from quarterly reports and analyses.” Founded in 2007 with headquarters in St. Peter Port, Guernsey, Perusa tells us that “we think globally and act locally.”

The Fund does not list the identities of key investors since disclosure is “regulated by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission under the Protection of Investors (Bailiwick of Guernsey) Law, 1987 (as amended).”

However, Christian Hollenberg, a founder of Perusa GmbH, says that Trovicor’s owners “only invest in ethical businesses” including Trovicor “which the fund owns in its entirety.”

Hollenberg told Silver and Elgin that Trovicor is “a legal business, and it’s part of every communications network in the civilized world.”

But as author Nicholas Shaxson told New Left Project in a wide-ranging interview, “Crown Dependencies” such as “Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man … have old histories as tax havens and have played an offshore role for decades, even centuries. They also got in on this game of attracting money by offering secrecy, zero taxes, and escape from laws.”

And with “partners and investors … based in the most important financial centers worldwide,” the Fund is inclined to invest “in smaller companies, in companies with faint profitability or with operative problems. We are flexible and always prepared for various situations.”

Perusa’s investment portfolio is a diverse, if strange mix. With interests ranging from the Swedish-based Dynasafe International, which offers “a comprehensive range of explosion containment and munitions destruction equipment as well as off gas treatment systems to customers all over the world,” to the medical implant firm GB Implantat-Technologie GmbH in Essen, Germany, and from Belgian-based Flamingo N.V., described as “a leading international company in the domestic pet sector” (!) to Trovicor, Guernsey-based Perusa certainly covers a wide range of investment opportunities.

Accordingly, “the fund we advise invests in companies that are confronted with dramatic change.” Trovicor, the firm which snapped-up Siemens Intelligence Platform fits the bill. “Do you want to spin off a business division from a larger organization and become independent?” Well, according to Perusa, “via the fund we advise, we can provide you with fresh capital and new and additional management respectively.”

But why would a multibillion euro firm such as Siemens find it necessary, or even desirable, to “spin-off” a profitable unit, one with unlimited growth potential in the über-lucrative “lawful interception” niche market”?

After all, this sector is worth some $3 billion annually, Jerry Lucas, the president of the McLean, Virginia-based TeleStrategies Inc., the organizers of ISS World trade shows for spooky companies servicing the secret state told Bloomberg Markets.

If we’re to believe statements from Nokia Siemens Networks spokesperson Ben Roome, “the elevated risk of human rights abuses was a major reason for NSN’s exiting the monitoring-center business.”

Quick to absolve the firm of any liability for designing and selling products to autocratic regimes that torture their citizens, Roome told Silver and Elgin that “ultimately people who use this technology to infringe human rights are responsible for their actions.”

And with ISS World Americas conference in Washington, D.C., right around the corner, enterprising security officials will learn “methodologies and tools to bridge the chasms of lawful intercept data gathering to information creation to investigator knowledge to actionable intelligence.”

One shudders to think what “knowledge” was shared last year amongst Middle Eastern spooks who attended ISS World MEA conclave in Dubai or what tips of the dirty trade Trovicor’s head of consulting, Jesper Mathiesen, gave his eager hosts.

Amongst the “tools” which Trovicor supplies, at a steep price rest assured, are spy kit for “intelligence mining;” “pattern recognition;” “behaviour profiling;” “indexing-text search,” that performs “in the background” on “contents of emails, web pages, Word documents, SMS, database records etc.;” “mobile location tracking” suites equipped with a “geographical information system,” an “ideal solution to track, record, extrapolate, and anticipate the movements of mobile devices;” “speaker recognition” and of course, “link analysis” tools which can be used “to find and graphically display correlating data of intercepted targets.”

And should current spy toys prove insufficient, additional “add-on applications are being developed to allow for maximum use of the information contained in the database of the Monitoring Center.”

Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar is in hiding today. He told Bloomberg Markets that “he took up the anti-torture cause after being detained and interrogated for six days in 2000. His jailers handcuffed him, hung him from a stick ‘like a goat’ and beat the soles of his feet.”

And when the activist returned from London in August 2010, after testifying about Bahraini human rights abuses before a committee at the House of Lords, plainclothes police took him away.

“For his first 85 days or so in custody,” Bloomberg Markets reported, “Al Khanjar saw no one from the outside.”

“For one agonizing stretch,” Silver and Elgin averred, “his jailers forced him to stand without sleeping for five days. At other times they beat him with hoses and their hands and threatened him with sexual abuse.”

“I’m hidden somewhere,” he says. “I’m unfortunately in Bahrain. They’re going to kill me. What to do? What to do?”

This raises an inevitable question: what will we do to bring down repressive, authoritarian governments, beginning with those in the West, which profit handsomely from screams dying in soundproof rooms?

That such behavior by our corporate masters no longer raises an eyebrow, let alone elicit action by authorities charged with stopping criminal miscreants destroying other people’s lives, is an unmistakable sign that the much-vaunted “free market” system, staring into an abyss of its own creation, has entered a terminal phase.

It now appears that insiders at Standard and Poor’s or the Treasury Department, take your pick, may have leaked information to privileged clients on the recent U.S. credit downgrade, with confirmation coming from a surprising source.

Last week, AntiSec cyber-guerrillas (a loose alliance amongst individuals affiliated with LulzSec and Anonymous) released a 1GB cache of emails filched from security contractor Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI).

Previously Anonymous and LulzSec have wrapped their keyboards around defense grifters Booz Allen Hamilton, ManTech International, NATO, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, InfraGard (a “public-private” security alliance amongst corporate heavy-hitters and the Bureau), the CIA, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (a so-called “fusion center” staffed by cops, federal agents, private contractors and the U.S. military), the Bay Area Rapid Transit agency (BART), Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, PBS, Fox News, and repressive governments such as Egypt, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.

Their latest campaign targeted VDI, a Texas-based firm, which specializes in the “development and deployment” of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS, killer drones). VDI “draws on specialized experience of senior aerospace engineers, former military special operations officers, military instructor pilots as well as retired Senior Executive Service Federal Agents,” claiming their “background and operational knowledge has afforded us the unique vision to provide a platform that will extend the security and response capabilities of any organization,” according to a blurb on their web site.

While VDI touts their ability to offer “support” to the “military, local, state and federal law enforcement as well as the private sector,” the firm also offers “a full scope of consulting services independent of our aerial technology.”

That “unique vision”, however, didn’t prevent AntiSec from spiriting away thousands of emails from VDI’s Senior Vice President Richard T. Garcia, a former FBI Assistant Director in Los Angeles who recently left a well-paid position as Global Security Manager for the environment-killing Shell Oil Corporation (can you say Niger Delta?) for “greener” pastures.

A press statement from AntiSec announced that the leak “contains internal meeting notes and contracts, schematics, non-disclosure agreements, personal information about other VDI employees, and several dozen ‘counter-terrorism’ documents classified as ‘law enforcement sensitive’ and ‘for official use only’.”

“Vanguard Defense Industries,” AntiSec writes, “manufactures unmanned ‘ShadowHawk’ drones which cost $640,000 and are equipped with grenade launchers and shotguns. ShadowHawks are currently in use by law enforcement, military, and private corporations deploying them in the US, the Horn of Africa, Panama, Columbia [sic], and US-Mexico border patrol operations. These emails contain contracts, schematics, non-disclosure agreements, and more. Additionally we found evidence of a Merrill Lynch wealth management advisor giving private advance notice to Garcia about upcoming S&P US credit rating downgrades.”

Improper Disclosures

In an April 25, 2011 email from Garcia to Gloria Newport, Cindy Cook, a Wealth Management Advisor with Bank of America-owned Merrill Lynch “advised that Standard and Poors, may lower the credit rating of the US Government which could cause a run on US Banks that will affect the Federal Reserve. They give the US Govt. 2 years to correct the current situation, which they believe both the Republican and Democratic solutions do not do enough and both parties may make this a political situation for the 2012 Presidential election and never come up with a answer to correct the situation within the two years set by Standard and Poors. She did not see any real Cyber issue that could change the situation.”

Investigative journalist Steve Ragan, writing at The Tech Herald (the publication that broke the story on Anonymous’s HBGary hack) informs us that “the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating whether there was any sort of insider trading done by S&P employees before the downgrade was official. The story hinged on comments made to the paper by sources close to the investigation itself.”

“On the day S&P cut the U.S.’s credit rating” Ragan writes, “Wall Street was flooded with downgrade rumors. These rumors started earlier in the day while trading was active. It turned out they were true.”

According to Bloomberg News the SEC “is scrutinizing the method Standard & Poor’s used to cut the U.S.’s credit rating and whether the firm properly protected the confidential decision, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.”

Reporter Joshua Gallu wrote August 14 that SEC staff are “looking into whether certain market participants learned of the downgrade before its announcement.”

Downplaying speculation that S&P employees may have breached SEC rules by leaking sensitive information to privileged clients, The New York Times, as is their wont, claimed “it is arguable whether S.&P.’s announcement on Aug. 5 of the rating change was all that confidential, given the speculation about it.”

“Assuming information about the downgrade was confidential,” the Times pontificates, “it must also be material, which means a reasonable investor would consider it important. This seems to be an easy element to establish because the wild gyrations in the market on the first trading day after the downgrade shows how investors viewed it.”

But Cook’s email to Garcia didn’t arrive in his in-box “on the first trading day after the downgrade” but nearly four months earlier, long before July’s political shenanigans over raising the federal debt ceiling, the ostensible reason why S&P downgraded America’s credit worthiness.

Maxine Waters (D-CA), wrote to SEC chairwoman, cover-up specialist Mary Schapiro, demanding that the commission “conduct an investigation into whether S.&P. selectively disclosed information related to the U.S. government debt downgrade to any financial institutions, and whether any institutions that had that nonpublic information traded on that information prior to the official announcement.”

It appears that Cook’s email to Garcia would confirm that S&P insiders did just that, providing information to Merrill Lynch and one can assume other financial firms.

Throwing cold water on charges that the rating’s agency acted improperly, the Times argues that “even if if the S.E.C. finds that the information was improperly disclosed, proving insider trading will be difficult.”

Why might that be?

According to the Times, “while S.&P. and other credit rating agencies are required to adopt policies to prevent such disclosure, it is questionable whether just leaking information violates any federal regulations, even if it breaches a corporate confidentiality policy.”

Lest readers believe, however, that the SEC will mount a comprehensive investigation of leaks by S&P insiders, they would do well to read Matt Taibbi’s latest piece for Rolling Stone.

According to congressional testimony by an SEC whistleblower, which sparked an investigation by that agency’s Inspector General, the commission’s enforcement division, under orders from higher-ups, who went on to secure well-paid positions with the firms they were charged to regulate, shredded a mountain of incriminating evidence detailing wrongdoing by some of the world’s top financial firms.

How many files, called “Matters Under Investigation” or MUI were destroyed? According to whistleblower Darcy Flynn, the SEC’s enforcement division “disappeared” some 18,000 files, including those of convicted fraudster Bernie Madoff, accused swindler, suspected CIA banker and drug money launderer R. Allen Stanford, as well as accusations that top-tier Wall Street investment banks such as J.P. Morgan Chase had engaged in insider trading.

Taibbi writes that “under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency’s records–’including case files relating to preliminary investigations’–are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term ‘Orwellian,’ devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation.”

It’s a nice deal if you can get it, which, of course, firms like Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, AIG and Lehman Brothers (before their 2008 collapse) managed to get in spades.

“We’ll never know,” Taibbi avers, “what the impact of those destroyed cases might have been; we’ll never know if those cases were closed for good reasons or bad. We’ll never know exactly who got away with what, because federal regulators have weighted down a huge sack of Wall Street’s dirty laundry and dumped it in a lake, never to be seen again.”

In this light, AntiSec’s hack of VDI is instructive. If for nothing else, it demonstrates that well-connected insiders reap billions from the collapse of the global economy, divvying-up the spoils amongst privileged friends and clients, including those inhabiting the nethermost regions of the secret state.

Cyberwar: Bringing it All Back Home, and Waging War on the Global Economy

As global elites scramble to seize as much advantage as possible over their rivals as the economy craters, intelligence methods deployed as part of imperialism’s endless “War on Terror” have migrated with a vengeance onto Wall Street.

Revelations by Anonymous earlier this year that a passel of Pentagon-linked security contractors had joined forces to run covert ops on whistleblowers and journalists set alarm bells ringing.

February’s release of some 75,000 emails filched from servers controlled by security grifters HBGary Federal and HBGary, uncovered a sordid scheme by the Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to target supporters of WikiLeaks and left-wing corporate critics.

That hack, in addition to exposing BofA’s illicit “Team Themis” gambit, a co-production of white shoe law firm Hunton & Williams, HBGary Federal, HBGary, Palantir Technologies (a recipient of CIA slush funds from its venture capital arm In-Q-Tel) and Berico Technologies, also revealed that the Pentagon and giant defense contractors such as General Dynamics had teamed up with HBGary to develop undetectable malware or “rootkits” for America’s emerging Cyberwar-Intelligence Complex, according to a series of documents published by the secrecy-shredding web site Public Intelligence.

Additional files revealed that HBGary and ManTech International had partnered-up with the National Security State for what they described as “Internet Based Reconnaissance Operations” that use “non-attributable internet access” methodologies (approved hacking by the secret state) for “operating system and network application identification,” “identification of possible perimeter defense” for “intelligence gap fill” and “counterintelligence research.” In other words, broad based internet spying on an array of “adversaries” (e.g., political dissidents, antiwar activists, anticorporate campaigners and other enemies of the state).

Further research by Project PM’s OpMetalGear revealed that defense giant Northrop Grumman and other firms such as HBGary Federal, TASC and ManTech International were engaged in a bidding war to spear the Pentagon’s Romas/COIN program (since renamed Odyssey).

That program, researcher Barrett Brown writes, is “a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once.” (For additional background see: “Security Grifters Partner-Up on Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Project,” Antifascist Calling, July 3, 2011)

We can assume that once intelligence sources and methods intended to target external enemies are turned inward and attack the American people, financial insiders too, would find such tools an exemplary means to crush their competitors and adversaries, the global working class.

Bankrupting and Criminalizing the State

“Economic warfare,” economist and researcher Michel Chossudovsky, writing in The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century, “consists in destabilizing countries and impoverishing their respective populations.”

Chossudovsky argues that “the manipulation of market forces through the imposition of strong ‘economic medicine’ under the helm of the IMF supports U.S.-NATO strategic and geopolitical objectives.”

Similarly,” Chossudovsky observes, “the speculative attacks waged by powerful banking conglomerates in the currency, commodity and stock markets are acts of financial warfare,” one in which the “financing of an oversized U.S. war economy triggers imbalances in the U.S. monetary system, destabilizes the U.S. fiscal structure and creates imbalances in the allocation of human and material resources.”

This tragedy is playing out today. The on-going market meltdown in the wake of the U.S. credit downgrade and the crisis in the Eurozone has affected tens of millions of workers who saw their retirement funds gobbled up by speculators. Additionally, states and municipalities “carrying debt tied to federal creditworthiness,” The Tech Herald avers, “each took a hit.”

Hard hit cities and states struggling under an enormous debt burden due to falling revenues, are held hostage by the credit rating agencies. As economist Michael Hudson points out in Global Research credit rating agencies such as Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch “are playing the political role of ‘enforcer’ as the gatekeepers to credit, to put pressure on Iceland, Greece and even the United States to pursue creditor-oriented policies that lead inevitably to financial crises.”

Hudson writes that these “crises in turn force debtor governments to sell off their assets under distress conditions. In pursuing this guard-dog service to the world’s bankers, the ratings agencies are escalating a political strategy they have long been refined over a generation in the corrupt arena of local U.S. politics.”

As the World Socialist Web Site observes, “the crisis of the world’s stock exchanges and financial markets is increasingly spiraling out of control. Governments are being driven by developments which they are unable to influence.”

Socialist critic Peter Schwarz notes that “the panic on the stock markets shows that traders are expecting a deep recession, already heralded by stagnating growth and rising unemployment rates,” and that “corporations will respond with new waves of layoffs, governments with further budget cuts.”

In a climate stoked by fear, war and those all-purpose boogeymen, “debt,” “terror” and now, “cyberwar,” the cost of bailing-out a looted capitalist economy are shouldered by the working class. These pressures in turn increase the downward spiral as employment, wages, manufacturing and consumer spending go into a tail-spin, a self-destructive feed-back loop that further exacerbates levels of unemployment, home foreclosures and generalized misery. The tentacles of this manufactured “debt crisis” reach everywhere–from the smallest town to the largest city.

Hudson avers that “localities are pressured when their rising debt levels lead to a financial stringency. Banks pull back their credit lines, and urge cities and states to pay down their debts by selling off their most viable public enterprises.”

And waiting in the wings are a new class of corporate vultures and rentier vampires who swoop down to reap the rewards gleaned by gobbling-up (looting) public assets at fire sale prices.

The rating agencies who profit at both ends of any transaction according to Hudson, “offer opinions” that have become a “big business” for the agencies. “So it is understandable why their business model opposes policies–and political candidates–that support the idea of basing public financing on taxation rather than by borrowing. This self-interest colors their ‘opinions’.”

Accordingly, “to acquiescence in such economically destructive financial behavior is the opposite of fiscal responsibility. Cutting federal taxes and Social Security payments to obtain a more positive S&P ‘opinion,” Hudson writes, “would give banks an ability to ‘pull the plug’ and force privatization and anti-labor austerity plans by refraining from rolling over the U.S. debt–and cutting taxes Tea-Party style rather than funding spending by taxation on a pay-as-you-go-basis.”

In this light, one can certainly understand why a Merrill Lynch “wealth management advisor” would offer her “knowledgeable judgement” (clubby insider info) to a dodgy security outfit such as VDI.

Working classes across Europe have not “gone gently into the night” of impoverishment; the great fear here in the heimat amongst corporatists and militarists alike, is that once working people realize the game is up they just might impose some “shock therapy” of their own!

As Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald (a target of “Team Themis’s” dirty tricks campaign) avers, speaking out about “the sprawling Surveillance State and the attempted criminalization of WikiLeaks and whistleblowing are so vital” to the defense of democracy.

“The free flow of information and communications enabled by new technologies–as protest movements in the Middle East and a wave of serious leaks over the last year have demonstrated–is a uniquely potent weapon in challenging entrenched government power and other powerful factions,” Greenwald writes.

“And that is precisely why those in power–those devoted to preservation of the prevailing social order–are so increasingly fixated on seizing control of it and snuffing out its potential for subverting that order: they are well aware of, and are petrified by, its power, and want to ensure that the ability to dictate how it is used, and toward what ends, remains exclusively in their hands.”

This is why actions by disparate groups such as AntiSec, Anonymous and WikiLeaks are informational beacons in an otherwise homogenized media landscape, one characterized by celebrity gossip, sex scandals and “crimes” carried out by poor and marginalized populations–never the filthy rich or the warmongers who murder millions as they launch resource wars that steal other people’s social property.

While firms such as VDI, Boeing, General Atomics and Lockheed Martin hawk drone technologies that transform human beings into red mist, and do so as their “patriotic” (and highly-profitable) duty as the Pentagon wholeheartedly embraces hypermodern forms of robotized mass murder, the bill for American hubris, long past due, is coming faster than most people think.

As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of a tattered social net (adieu Medicare and Medicaid! Social Security? Au revoir!), the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs first stood-up by the Bush government.

After all, with world share prices gyrating wildly, employment and wages in a death spiral, and retirement funds and publicly-owned assets swallowed whole by speculators and rentier scum, the state better dust-off contingency plans lest the Greek, Spanish or British “contagion” spread beyond the fabled shores of “old Europe” and infect God-fearin’ folk here in the heimat.

Fear not, they have and the lyrically-titled Civil Disturbances: Emergency Employment of Army and Other Resources, otherwise known as Army Regulation 500-50, spells out the “responsibilities, policy, and guidance for the Department of the Army in planning and operations involving the use of Army resources in the control of actual or anticipated civil disturbances.” (emphasis added)

With British politicians demanding a clampdown on social media in the wake of London riots, and with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency having done so last week in San Francisco, switching off underground cell phone service to help squelch a protest against police violence, authoritarian control tactics, aping those deployed in Egypt and Tunisia (that worked out well!) are becoming the norm in so-called “Western democracies.”

Secret Law, Secret Programs

Meanwhile up on Capitol Hill, Congress did their part to defend us from that pesky Bill of Rights; that is, before 81 of them–nearly a fifth of “our” elected representatives–checked-out for AIPAC-funded junkets to Israel.

Secrecy News reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee “rejected an amendment that would have required the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to confront the problem of ‘secret law,’ by which government agencies rely on legal authorities that are unknown or misunderstood by the public.”

That amendment, proposed by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) was rejected by voice vote, further entrenching unprecedented surveillance powers of Executive Branch agencies such as the FBI and NSA.

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department “demanding the release of a secret legal memo used to justify FBI access to Americans’ telephone records without any legal process or oversight.”

The DOJ refused and it now appears that the Senate has affirmed that “secret law” should be guiding principles of our former republic.

Secrecy News also disclosed that the Committee rejected a second amendment to the authorization bill, one that would have required the Justice Department’s Inspector General “to estimate the number of Americans who have had the contents of their communications reviewed in violation of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 [FAA].”

As pointed out here many times, FAA is a pernicious piece of Bushist legislative detritus that legalized the previous administration’s secret spy programs since embellished by our current “hope and change” president.

During the run-up to FAA’s passage, congressional Democrats, including then-Senator Barack Obama and his Republican colleagues across the aisle, claimed that the law would “strike a balance” between Americans’ privacy rights and the needs of security agencies to “stop terrorists” attacking the country.

If that’s the case, then why can’t the American people learn whether their rights have been compromised?

Perhaps, as recent reports in Truthout and other publications suggest, former U.S. counterterrorism “czar” Richard Clarke leveled “explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials — George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee — accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence … about two of the 9/11 hijackers who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks.”

Clarke’s allegations follow closely on the heels of an investigation by Truthout journalists Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold.

“Based on on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and an interview with a former high-ranking counterterrorism official,” Kaye and Leopold learned that “a little-known military intelligence unit, unbeknownst to the various investigative bodies probing the terrorist attacks, was ordered by senior government officials to stop tracking Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s movements prior to 9/11.”

As readers are well aware, the 9/11 provocation was the pretext used by the capitalist state to wage aggressive resource wars abroad while ramming through repressive legislation like the USA Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act that targeted the democratic rights of the American people here at home.

But FAA did more then legitimate illegal programs. It also handed retroactive immunity and economic cover to giant telecoms like AT&T and Verizon who profited handily from government surveillance, shielding them from monetary damages which may have resulted from a spate of lawsuits such as Hepting v. AT&T.

This raises the question: are other U.S. firms similarly shielded from scrutiny by secret annexes in FAA or the privacy-killing USA Patriot Act?

Echelon Cubed

Last week, Softpedia revealed that “Google has admitted complying with requests from US intelligence agencies for data stored in its European data centers, most likely in violation of European Union data protection laws.”

“At the center of this problem,” reporter Lucian Constantin wrote, “is the USA PATRIOT ACT, which states that companies incorporated in the United States must hand over data administered by their foreign subsidiaries if requested.”

“Not only that,” the publication averred, “they can be forced to keep quiet about it in order to avoid exposing active investigations and alert those targeted by the probes.”

In other words, despite strict privacy laws that require companies operating within the EU to protect the personal data of their citizens, reports suggest that U.S. firms, operating under an entirely different legal framework, U.S. spy laws with built-in secrecy clauses and gag orders, trump the laws and legal norms of other nations.

Given the widespread corporate espionage carried out by the National Security Agency’s decades-long Echelon communications’ intercept program, American firms such as Google, Microsoft, Apple or Amazon may very well have become witting accomplices of U.S. secret state agencies rummaging about for “actionable intelligence” on EU, or U.S., citizens.

Indeed, a decade ago the European Union issued its final report on the Echelon spying machine and concluded that the program was being used for corporate and industrial espionage and that data filched from EU firms was being turned over to American corporations.

In 2000, the BBC reported that according to European investigators “U.S. Department of Commerce ‘success stories’ could be attributed to the filtering powers of Echelon.”

Duncan Campbell, a British journalist and intelligence expert, who along with New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager, helped blow the lid off Echelon, offered two instances of U.S. corporate spying in the 1990s when the newly-elected Clinton administration followed up on promises of “aggressive advocacy” on behalf of U.S. firms “bidding for foreign contracts.”

According to Campbell, NSA “lifted all the faxes and phone-calls between Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi Government” to gain this information. In a second case which came to light, Campbell documented how “Raytheon used information picked up from NSA snooping to secure a $1.4bn contract to supply a radar system to Brazil instead of France’s Thomson-CSF.”

As Softpedia reported, U.S.-based cloud computing services operating overseas have placed “European companies and government agencies that are using their services … in a tough position.”

With the advent of fiber optic communication platforms, programs like Echelon have a far greater, and more insidious, reach. AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein noted on the widespread deployment by NSA of fiber optic splitters and secret rooms at American telecommunications’ firms:

What screams out at you when examining this physical arrangement is that the NSA was vacuuming up everything flowing in the Internet stream: e-mail, web browsing, Voice-Over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it. The splitter has no intelligence at all, it just makes a blind copy. There could not possibly be a legal warrant for this, since according to the 4th Amendment warrants have to be specific, “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. …

This was a massive blind copying of the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together. From a legal standpoint, it does not matter what they claim to throw away later in their secret rooms, the violation has already occurred at the splitter. (Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… And Fighting It, Charleston, South Carolina: BookSurge, 2009, pp. 38-39.)

What was Google’s response?

In a statement to the German publication WirtschaftsWoche a Google corporate spokesperson said:

As a law abiding company, we comply with valid legal process, and that–as for any U.S. based company–means the data stored outside of the U.S. may be subject to lawful access by the U.S. government. That said, we are committed to protecting user privacy when faced with law enforcement requests. We have a long track record of advocating on behalf of user privacy in the face of such requests and we scrutinize requests carefully to ensure that they adhere to both the letter and the spirit of the law before complying.” (translation courtesy of Public Intelligence)

Is the Senate Intelligence Committee’s steadfast refusal to release documents and secret legal memos that most certainly target American citizens also another blatant example of American exceptionalism meant to protect U.S. firms operating abroad from exposure as corporate spies for the government?

It isn’t as if NSA hasn’t been busy doing just that here at home.

As The New York Times reported back in 2009, the “National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year.”

Chalking up the problem to “overcollection” and “technical difficulties,” unnamed intelligence officials and administration lawyers told journalists Eric Lichtblau and James Risen that although the practice was “significant and systemic … it was believed to have been unintentional.”

As “unintentional” as ginned-up intelligence that made the case for waging aggressive war against oil-rich Iraq!

In a follow-up piece, the Times revealed that NSA “appears to have tolerated significant collection and examination of domestic e-mail messages without warrants.”

A former NSA analyst “read into” the illegal program told Lichtblau and Risen that he “and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages.”

Email readily handed over by Google, Microsoft or other firms “subject to lawful access” by the Pentagon spy satrapy?

The Times’ anonymous source said “Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits–no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told–and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches.”

Nor, were they excluded from such illicit practices.

As Jane Mayer revealed in The New Yorker, “privacy controls” and “anonymizing features” of a program called ThinThread, which would have complied with the law if Americans’ communications were swept into NSA’s giant eavesdropping nets, were rejected in favor of the “$1.2 billion flop” called Trailblazer.

And, as previously reported, when Wyden and Udall sought information from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on just how many Americans had their communications monitored, the DNI stonewalled claiming “it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority.”

Why? Precisely because such programs act like a giant electronic sponge and soak up and data mine huge volumes of our communications.

As former NSA manager and ThinThread creator Bill Binney told The New Yorker, that “little program … got twisted” and was “used to eavesdrop on the whole world.”

Three years after Barack Obama promised to curb Bush administration “excesses,” illegal surveillance programs continue to expand under his watch.

A Permanent “State of Exception”

Under our current political set-up, “states of exception” and national security “emergencies” have become permanent features of social life.

Entire classes of citizens and non-citizens alike are now suspect; anarchists, communists, immigrants, Muslims, union activists and political dissidents in general are all subject to unprecedented levels of scrutiny and surveillance.

From “enhanced security screenings” at airports to the massive expansion of private and state databases that archive our spending habits, whom we talk to and where we go, increasingly, as the capitalist system implodes and millions face the prospect of economic ruin, the former American republic takes on the characteristics of a corporate police state.

Security researcher and analyst Christopher Soghoian reported on his Slight Paranoia blog, that according to “an official DOJ report, the use of ‘emergency’, warrantless requests to ISPs for customer communications content has skyrocketed over 400% in a single year.”

This is no trifling matter.

As CNET News disclosed last month, “Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year–in case police want to review them in the future–under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.”

Declan McCullagh reported that “the 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall’s elections.”

Significantly, CNET noted that this is also a “victory” for Democratic appointees of Barack Obama’s Justice Department “who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements.”

According to CNET, a “last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses.”

However, by “a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.”

Consider the troubling implications of this sweeping bill. While ultra-rightist “Tea Party” Republicans vowed to get “the government off our backs,” when it comes to illicit snooping by securocrats whose only loyalty is to a self-perpetuating security bureaucracy and the defense grifters they serve (and whom they rely upon for plum positions after government “retirement”), all our private data is now up for grabs.

The bill, according to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who spearheaded opposition to the measure said that if passed, it would create “a data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites.”

To make the poison pill legislation difficult to oppose, proponents have dubbed it, wait, the “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011″ even though, as CNET noted, “the mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well.”

Soghoian relates that the 2009 two-page Justice Department report to Congress took 11 months (!) to release under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Why the Justice Department stonewall?

Perhaps, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation disclosed last year, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security and presumably other secret state satrapies, ordered “an extra layer of review on its FOIA requests.”

EFF revealed that a 2009 policy memo from the Department’s Chief FOIA Officer and Chief Privacy Officer, Mary Ellen Callahan, that DHS components “were required to report ‘significant FOIA activities’ in weekly reports to the Privacy Office, which the Privacy Office then integrated into its weekly report to the White House Liaison.”

Included amongst designated “significant FOIA activities” were requests “from any members of ‘an activist group, watchdog organization, special interest group, etc.’ and ‘requested documents [that] will garner media attention or [are] receiving media attention’.”

Despite the appearance of reporting “emergency” spying requests to congressional committees presumably overseeing secret state activities (a generous assumption at best), “it is quite clear” Soghoian avers, “that the Department of Justice statistics are not adequately reporting the scale of this form of surveillance” and “underreport these disclosures by several orders of magnitude.”

As such, “the current law is largely useless.” It does not apply to “state and local law enforcement agencies, who make tens of thousands of warrantless requests to ISPs each year,” and is inapplicable to “to federal law enforcement agencies outside DOJ.”

“Finally,” Soghoian relates, “it does not apply to emergency disclosures of non-content information, such as geo-location data, subscriber information (such as name and address), or IP addresses used.”

And with Congress poised to pass sweeping data retention legislation, it should be clear that such “requirements” are mere fig leaves covering-up state-sanctioned lawlessness.

War On Terror 2.0.1: Looting the Global Economy

Criminal behavior by domestic security agencies connect America’s illegal wars of aggression to capitalism’s economic warfare against the working class, who now take their place alongside “Islamic terrorists” as a threat to “national security.”

Despite efforts by the Obama administration and Republican congressional leaders to “balance the books” on the backs of the American people through massive budget cuts, as economist Michael Hudson pointed out in Global Research, the manufactured “debt ceiling” crisis is a massive fraud.

The World Socialist Web Site averred that:

As concerns over a double-dip recession in the US and the European debt crisis sent global markets plunging–including a 512-point sell-off on the Dow Jones Industrial Average Thursday–financial analysts and media pundits developed a new narrative. Concern that Washington lacked the ‘political will’ to slash long-standing entitlement programs was exacerbating ‘market uncertainty’.

Leftist critic Jerry White noted that “in fact, the new cuts will only intensify the economic crisis, while the slashing of food stamps, unemployment compensation, health care and education will eliminate programs that are more essential for survival than ever.”

Indeed, as Marxist economist Richard Wolff pointed out in The Guardian, while the “crisis of the capitalist system in the US that began in 2007,” may have “plunged millions into acute economic pain and suffering,” the “recovery” that began in 2009 “benefited only the minority that was most responsible for the crisis: banks, large corporations and the rich who own the bulk of stocks. That so-called recovery never ‘trickled down’ to the US majority: working people dependent on jobs and wages’.”

And despite mendacious claims by political officials and the media alike, the Pentagon will be sitting pretty even as Americans are forced to shoulder the financial burden of U.S. imperial adventures long into an increasingly bleak future.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta “warned Thursday of dire consequences if the Pentagon is forced to make cuts to its budget beyond the $400 billion in savings planned for the next decade,” The Washington Post reported.

The Post noted that “senior Pentagon officials have launched an offensive over the past two days to convince lawmakers that further reductions in Pentagon spending would imperil the country’s security.”

“Instead of slashing defense,” Panetta urged lawmakers to “rely on tax increases and cuts to nondiscretionary spending, such as Medicare and Social Security, to provide the necessary savings.”

But as Hudson points out, “war has been the major cause of a rising national debt.” After all, it was none other than bourgeois icon Adam Smith who argued that “parliamentary checks on government spending were designed to prevent ambitious rulers from waging war.”

Hudson writes that “if people felt the economic impact of war immediately–rather than postponing it by borrowing–they would be less likely to support military adventurism.”

But therein lies the rub. Since “military adventurism” is the only “growth sector” of an imploding capitalist economy, the public spigot which finances everything from cost-overrun-plagued stealth fighter jets to multi-billion dollar spy satellites, along with an out-of-control National Surveillance State, will be kept open indefinitely.

On this score, the hypocrisy of our rulers abound, especially when it comes to the mantra that “we” must “live within our means.”

As Wolff avers:

Where was that phrase heard when Washington decided to spend on an immense military (even after becoming the world’s only nuclear superpower) or to spend on very expensive wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya (now all going on at the same time)? No, then the talk was only about national security needed to save us from attacks.

“Attacks,” it should be duly noted, that may very well have been allowed to happen as the World Socialist Web Site recently reported.

Driving home the point that war, and not social and infrastructure investment fuel deficits, Hudson averred that “the present rise in in U.S. Treasury debt results from two forms of warfare. First is the overtly military Oil War in the Near East, from Iraq to Afghanistan (Pipelinistan) to oil-rich Libya. These adventures will end up costing between $3 and $5 trillion.”

“Second and even more expensive,” the economist observed, “is the more covert yet more costly economic war of Wall Street against the rest of the economy, demanding that losses by banks and financial institutions be passed onto the government balance sheet (‘taxpayers’). The bailouts and ‘free lunch’ for Wall Street–by no coincidence, Congress’s number one political campaign contributor–cost $13 trillion.”

“Now that finance is the new form of warfare,” Hudson wrote, “where is the power to constrain Treasury and Federal Reserve power to commit taxpayers to bail out financial interests at the top of the economic pyramid?”

And since “cutbacks in federal revenue sharing will hit cities and states hard, forcing them to sell off yet more land, roads and other assets in the public domain to cover their budget deficit as the U.S. economy sinks further into depression,” Hudson wrote that “Congress has just added fiscal deflation to debt deflation, slowing employment even further.”

While the global economy circles the drain, with ever more painful cuts in so-called “entitlement” programs meant to cushion the crash now on the chopping block, the corporate and political masters who rule the roost are sharpening their knives, fashioning administrative and bureaucratic surveillance tools, the better to conceal the “invisible hand” of that bitch-slaps us all.

And they call it “freedom.”

In March, a written statement to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security by Justice Department official Todd Hinnen confirmed that the administration had used Section 215, the so-called “business records” section of the Act “to obtain driver’s license records, hotel records, car rental records, apartment leasing records, credit card records, and the like.”

Further confirmation of Wyden’s charges came from an unlikely source: a White House nominee for a top counterterrorism position.

Last week Wired reported that Matthew Olsen, the administration’s pick to head the National Counterterrorism Center “acknowledged that ‘some of the pleadings and opinions related to the Patriot Act’ to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that approves snooping warrants ‘are classified’.”

If confirmed, Olsen will replace Michael E. Leiter, the Bushist embed who told the Senate last year during hearings into 2009′s aborted plot to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day: “I will tell you, that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another.”

What those reasons are for wanting a terrorist to board a packed airliner were not spelled out to Senate nor were they explored by corporate media. This raises an inevitable question: what else is the administration concealing from the American people?

White House Stonewall

Back in May, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department “demanding the release of a secret legal memo used to justify FBI access to Americans’ telephone records without any legal process or oversight.”

So far, the administration has refused to release the memos.

According to the civil liberties’ watchdogs, a report last year by the DOJ’s own Inspector General “revealed how the FBI, in defending its past violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), had come up with a new legal argument to justify secret, unchecked access to private telephone records.”

“The Obama administration,” The Washington Post reports, has continued “to resist the efforts of two Democratic senators to learn more about the government’s interpretation of domestic surveillance law, stating that ‘it is not reasonably possible’ to identify the number of Americans whose communications may have been monitored under the statute.”

In a letter to Wyden and Senator Mark Udall (D-CO), Kathleen Turner, the director of legislative affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), claimed that a “joint oversight team” has not uncovered evidence “of any intentional or willful attempts to violate or circumvent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA, which was amended in 2008.”

Turner went on to say that “with respect to FAA” [FISA Amendments Act of 2008, the statute that "legalized" Bushist surveillance programs and handed retroactive immunity to spying telecoms like AT&T], “you [Wyden] asked whether any significant interpretations of the FAA are currently classified. As you are aware, opinions of the FISA Court usually contain extensive discussions of particularly sources, methods and operations and are therefore classified.”

Throwing the onus back on political grifters in the House and Senate, Turner wrote: “Even though not publicly available, by law any opinion containing a significant legal interpretation is provided to the congressional intelligence committees.”

With circular logic Turner claims that because “FISA Court opinions are so closely tied to the facts of the application under review that they cannot be made public in any meaningful form without compromising the sensitive sources and methods at issue.”

At best, her statement is disingenuous. After all, it is precisely that secret interpretation of the law made by the White House Office of Legal Counsel that Wyden and others, including EFF, the Electronic Privacy Information Network (EPIC) and journalists are demanding the administration clarify.

Justice Department Shields NSA’s Private Partners

The FBI isn’t the only agency shielded by the Justice Department under cover of bogus “state secrets” assertions by the Obama administration.

On July 13, EPIC reported that a U.S. District Court Judge issued an opinion in their lawsuit (EPIC v. NSA), “and accepted the NSA’s claim” that it can “neither confirm nor deny” that the agency “had entered into a relationship with Google following the China hacking incident in January 2010.”

The privacy watchdogs sought documents under FOIA “because such an agreement could reveal that the NSA is developing technical standards that would enable greater surveillance of Internet users.”

According to EPIC, the administration’s “Glomar response” to “neither confirm nor deny” a covert relationship amongst giant media corporations such as Google and secret state agencies “is a controversial legal doctrine that allows agencies to conceal the existence of records that might otherwise be subject to public disclosure.”

This issue is hardly irrelevant to internet users. CNET News reported last week that “Google’s Street View cars collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world, a practice that raises novel privacy concerns.”

And given the government’s penchant to vacuum-up so-called “transactional data” without benefit of a warrant, would media giants such as Google, high-tech behemoths such as Apple or Microsoft, beholden to the federal government for regulatory perks, resist efforts by the feds demanding they cough-up users’ locational data?

Investigative journalist Declan McCullagh found that the cars “were supposed to collect the locations of Wi-Fi access points. But Google also recorded the street addresses and unique identifiers of computers and other devices using those wireless networks and then made the data publicly available through Google.com until a few weeks ago.”

According to CNET, “the French data protection authority, known as the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) recently contacted CNET and said its investigation confirmed that Street View cars collected these unique hardware IDs. In March, CNIL’s probe resulted in a fine of 100,000 euros, about $143,000.”

On Friday, CNET reported that Microsoft too is in on the geolocation spy game.

Declan McCullagh wrote that “Microsoft has collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world and makes them available on the Web.”

A security researcher confirmed that the “vast database available through Live.com publishes the precise geographical location, which can point to a street address and sometimes even a corner of a building, of Android phones, Apple devices, and other Wi-Fi enabled gadgets.”

Such information in the hands of government snoops would prove invaluable when it comes to waging War On Terror 2.0, the so-called “cyber war.” Which is why the administration is fighting tooth and nail to keep this information from the public.

On the cyber front, EPIC is suing the White House to obtain the top secret National Security Presidential Directive that sets out the “NSA’s cyber security authority,” and is seeking clarification from the agency about so-called internet vulnerability assessments, “the Director’s classified views on how the NSA’s practices impact Internet privacy, and the NSA’s ‘Perfect Citizen’ program.”

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, “Perfect Citizen” is a $100 million privacy-killing program under development by the agency and defense giant Raytheon. Published reports informed us that the program will rely on a suite of sensors deployed in computer networks and that proprietary software will persistently monitor whichever system they are plugged into.

While little has been revealed about how Perfect Citizen will work, it was called by a corporate insider the cyber equivalent of “Big Brother,” according to an email obtained last year by The Wall Street Journal.

New Report Highlights “Transparency” Fraud

The refusal by the White House to divulge information that impact Americans’ civil liberties and privacy rights, along with their expansion of repressive national security and surveillance programs launched by the Bush regime, underscores the fraudulent nature of Obama’s so-called “transparency administration.”

A new report published by the American Civil Liberties Union, Drastic Measures Required: Congress needs to Overhaul U.S. Secrecy Laws and Increase Oversight of the Secret Security Establishment, documents how “out-of-control secrecy is a serious disease that is hurting American democracy.”

Authors Jay Stanley and former FBI undercover agent turned whistleblower, Michael German, write that “we are now living in an age of government secrecy run amok.”

According to the report, “reality has not always lived up to the rhetoric” of the Obama regime. Since the administration took office, the White House:

• Embraced the Bush administration’s tactic of using overbroad “state secrets” claims to block lawsuits challenging government misconduct.

• Fought a court order to release photos depicting the abuse of detainees held in U.S. custody and supported legislation to exempt these photos from FOIA retroactively. Worse, the legislation gave the Secretary of Defense sweeping authority to withhold any visual images depicting the government’s “treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained” by U.S. forces, no matter how egregious the conduct depicted or how compelling the public’s interest in disclosure.

• Threatened to veto legislation designed to reform congressional notification procedures for covert actions.

• Aggressively pursued whistleblowers who reported waste, fraud and abuse in national security programs with criminal prosecutions to a greater degree than any previous presidential administration.

• Refused to declassify information about how the government uses its authority under section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect information about Americans not relevant to terrorism or espionage investigations. (Mike German and John Stanley, Drastic Measures Required, Washington, D.C., The American Civil Liberties Union, July 2011, pp. 7-8)

Amongst other findings in the report we learn that more than 2.4 million personnel, “official” denizens of the secret state which include the 16 agencies of the so-called “Intelligence Community” and outsourced private contractors hold top secret and above security clearances.

Although the Government Accountability Office (GAO) disclosed that the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2010 “required required the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to calculate and report the aggregate number of security clearances for all government employees and contractors to Congress by February 2011,” as of this writing “the DNI has so far failed to produce this data.”

Last year, The Washington Post’s “Top Secret America” series revealed that “some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States,” and that “the privatization of national security” has been made possible by a “nine-year ‘gusher’ of money.”

The Post’s reporting on America’s security outsourcing mania echoed critical investigations by other journalists, including those by Tim Shorrock, who has reported extensively on intelligence privatization in his essential book Spies For Hire and by James Bamford in The Shadow Factory, which explored how NSA was turned loose on the American people.

In a follow-up piece last December, investigative journalists Dana Priest and William M. Arkin described how “the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.”

“The government’s goal,” Priest and Arkin wrote, “is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.”

As the Post reported, “technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.”

This is a pernicious development. As I reported three years ago, one such program was efforts by the Department of Homeland Security, partnering-up with the Pentagon, to train America’s fleet of top secret surveillance satellites on the American people.

That program, since killed by DHS, the National Applications Office, would have provided state and local authorities access to geospatial intelligence gleaned from military spy satellites and would have done so with no congressional oversight or privacy controls in place and would have handed over this sensitive data to selected law enforcement partners.

Local Police Control Ceded to the FBI

Along with intrusive techniques and highly-classified programs, Priest and Arkin wrote that the FBI has built “a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously.”

What constitutes “suspicious behavior”, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and can constitute anything from taking photographs on a public street to organizing and participating in protests against America’s endless wars.

Just recently, the San Francisco Bay Guardian revealed that local cops “assigned to the FBI’s terrorism task force can ignore local police orders and California privacy laws to spy on people without any evidence of a crime.”

Investigative journalist Sarah Phelan discovered that even after a “carefully crafted” set of rules on intelligence gathering had been in place “since police spying scandals of the 1990s,” were “bypassed without the knowledge or consent of the S.F. Police Commission.”

John Crew, a police practices expert with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, told the Bay Guardian that the 2007 Memorandum of Understanding by S.F. cops and the FBI means that “Police Commission policies do not apply” and that it “allows San Francisco police to circumvent local intelligence-gathering policies and follow more permissive federal rules.”

Despite serious concerns over the Bureau’s long-standing practice of spying on political dissidents and its “War On Terror” racial profiling policies, in a follow-up piece the Bay Guardian reported that Police Commission President Thomas Mazzucco, a former federal prosecutor, seemed “more concerned about defending federal practices and officials … than worrying about the role and authority of the civilian oversight body he now represents.”

The ACLU’s Crew noted that when the FBI came to the SFPD with a new MOU, “there was no review by the City Attorney, and no notice to the police commission.”

“Now, we didn’t know about that MOU because it was kept secret at the insistence of the FBI for four years,” Crew told Sarah Phelan. Crew also noted that when ACLU and ALC [Asian Law Caucus] met with the SFPD in 2010, they were suddenly told that the police department couldn’t talk about these issues without FBI permission.

“That set off a warning sign,” Crew observed, “noting that in early April, when the ACLU and ALC finally got the MOU released, their worst suspicions were confirmed.”

“There was no public discussion of transforming the SFPD into a national intelligence gathering association,” ALC attorney Veena Dubal told the Bay Guardian. “The problem is that the FBI changed the deal, and the SFPD signed it, without telling anyone.”

Neither the Bay Guardian nor the ACLU of Northern California have released the 2007 Memorandum of Understanding. However, the secrecy-shredding web site Public Intelligence has posted a sample MOU that makes for interesting reading indeed.

According to the document, local police agencies who participate in JTTFs will adhere to loose rules covered by the “Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations.” As Antifascist Calling reported last month, those rules will soon be loosened even further by “constitutional scholar” Barack Obama’s Justice Department.

But here’s the kicker; local police participating in JTTFs will be subject to rules crafted in Washington. State and municipal policies which sought to limit out-of-control spying on local activists by notorious police “Red Squads,” are annulled in favor of “guidance on investigative matters handled by the JTTF” that “will be issued by the Attorney General and the FBI.”

Such “guidance” we’re told governs everything from “the Use of Confidential Informants” to “Guidelines Regarding Disclosure to the Director of Central Intelligence and Homeland Security Officials of Foreign Intelligence Acquired in the Course of a Criminal Investigation.”

In other words, police participating in JTTFs become the CIA’s eyes on the ground!

We are informed that “in order to comply with Presidential Directives, the policy and program management of the JTTFs is the responsibility of FBI Headquarters (FBIHQ).” As readers are well aware, more often than not those “Presidential Directives” arrive with built-in poison pills in the form of top secret annexes concealed from the public.

Such questions are not academic exercises.

More than three years ago, author and researcher Peter Dale Scott wrote in CounterPunch that “Congressman Peter DeFazio, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told the House that he and the rest of his Committee had been barred from reviewing parts of National Security Presidential Directive 51, the White House supersecret plans to implement so-called ‘Continuity of Government’ in the event of a mass terror attack or natural disaster.”

“The story,” Scott wrote, “ignored by the mainstream press, involved more than the usual tussle between the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. Government. What was at stake was a contest between Congress’s constitutional powers of oversight, and a set of policy plans that could be used to suspend or modify the constitution.”

Should something go wrong, the onus for civil or criminal penalties resulting from lawsuits for illegal acts by JTTF officers rests solely with local taxpayers who may have to foot the bill. This is clearly spelled out: “The Participating Agency acknowledges that financial and civil liability, if any and in accordance with applicable law, for the acts and omissions of each employee detailed to the JTTF remains vested with his or her employing agency.”

Got that? You violate someone’s rights and then get caught, well, tough luck chumps.

Intelligence Spending, No End in Sight

While the administration and their troglodytic Republican allies in Congress are planning massive cuts in social spending as a result of a manufactured “deficit crisis,” the President’s fiscal year 2012 budget proposes a five-year freeze for “all discretionary spending outside of security.”

Indeed, according to the Associated Press, the Defense Department will reap a windfall — some $727.4 billion and DHS $44.3 billion. But these numbers only tell part of the story.

Back in March, Secrecy News disclosed that figures provided by ODNI and the Secretary of Defense “document the steady rise of the total U.S. intelligence budget from $63.5 billion in FY2007 up to last year’s total of $80.1 billion.”

Americans are told they face “hard choices” when it comes to America’s fiscal house of cards and that they–and they alone–not the capitalist thieves who destroyed the economy, must shoulder the burden.

But as economist Michael Hudson warned last week in Global Research, the American people are “being lead to economic slaughter.”

Hudson writes that “whenever one finds government officials and the media repeating an economic error as an incessant mantra, there always is a special interest at work. The financial sector in particular seeks to wrong-foot voters into believing that the economy will be plunged into crisis if Wall Street does not get its way–usually by freeing it from taxes and deregulating it.”

However, when it comes to the secret state and the corporate interests they serve, regulators, in the form of congressional oversight or the public, seeking answers about illegal government programs, need not apply.

After all, as ODNI securocrat Kathleen Turner told the Senate, “the questions you pose … are difficult to answer in an unclassified letter.”And so it goes…

Those firms, including now-defunct HBGary Federal, parent company HBGary, Palantir (a start-up flush with cash from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel) and Berico Technologies had partnered-up with the Bank of America’s law firm Hunton & Williams and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and devised a sub rosa plan of attack against WikiLeaks and Chamber critics.

And when the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous published some 70,000 emails and documents filched from HBGary servers, it was off to the races.

In the intervening months since that story first broke, journalists and researchers have turned their attention to a dark web of security firms developing surveillance software for law enforcement, the Pentagon, and repressive foreign governments.

Last week, Wired revealed that one such shadowy firm, TruePosition, “a holding of the Liberty Media giant that owns Sirius XM and the Atlanta Braves,” is marketing “something it calls ‘location intelligence,’ or LOCINT, to intelligence and law enforcement agencies,” investigative journalist Spencer Ackerman disclosed.

The Pennsylvania-based company has sold their location services system to NSA surveillance partner AT&T and T-Mobile, allowing those carriers to pinpoint “over 60 million 911 calls annually.”

“For the better part of decade,” Ackerman writes, “TruePosition has had contracts to provide E-911 services with AT&T (signed originally with Cingular in 2001, which AT&T acquired) and T-Mobile (2003).”

Known as “geofencing,” the firm explains that location tech “collects, analyzes, stores and displays real-time and historical wireless events and locations of targeted mobile users.”

Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported that amongst the services TruePosition offers clients are “products for safety and security applications, including family monitoring, personal medical alert, emergency number service, and criminal tracking.”

Additionally, BusinessWeek reports, the company tailors its “enterprise applications” to corporations interested in “workforce management, asset tracking, and location-based advertising; consumer applications, including local search, traffic, and navigation.”

But what should concern readers is the firm’s “government applications” market which includes everything from “homeland security” and “military intelligence” to “force tracking.”

According to a press release posted on the firm’s web site, the “TruePosition Location Intelligence Management System (LIMS)” is a “a multi-dimensional database, which uses probes within mobile networks to capture and store all mobile phone network events–including the time and the location of events. Mobile phone events are items like calls made and received, text messages sent and received, a phone powered on and off, and other rich mobile phone intelligence.”

Deploying technology dubbed Uplink Time Difference of Arrival (U-TDOA), the system, installed on cell phone towers, identifies a phone’s approximate location–within 30 meters–even if the handset isn’t equipped with GPS.

Undoubtedly the system can save lives. “In one case,” Ackerman reports, “a corrections officer … was abducted by a recent parolee. But because her cellphone was turned on and her carrier used TruePosition’s location tech, police were able to locate the phone along a Kentucky highway. They set up a roadblock, freed the officer and arrested her captor.”

All well and good. However, in the hands of repressive governments or privacy-invading corporations, say Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, there just might be far different outcomes.

A Link to the Murdoch Scandal?

The relevance of location intelligence in general and more pointedly, TruePosition’s LIMS cellphone surveillance products which may, or may not, have been sold to London’s Metropolitan Police and what role they may have played in the Murdoch News of the World (NoW) phone hacking scandal have not been explored by corporate media.

While the “who, what, where” aspects of the scandal are now coming sharply into focus, the “how,” that is, the high-tech wizardry behind invasive privacy breaches, and which firms developed and profited from their sale, have been ignored.

Such questions, and related business entanglements, should be of interest to investigators on both sides of the Atlantic.

After all, TruePosition’s parent company, the giant conglomerate Liberty Media currently holds an 18 percent stake in News Corporation.

With corporate tentacles stretching from investments in TimeWarner Cable to Expedia and from QVC to Starz and beyond, Liberty Media is a multi-billion dollar media behemoth with some $10.9 billion in revenue in 2010, according to an SEC filing by the firm.

With deep pockets and political clout in Washington the company is “juiced.”

In 2011, Liberty’s CEO, John C. Malone, surpassed Ted Turner as the largest private landowner in the United States, controlling some 2.1 million acres according to The New York Times.

Dubbed “Darth Vader” by The Independent, Malone acquired a 20 percent stake in News Corp. back in 2000 and “was one of the main investors who rode to the rescue of Mr Murdoch in the early 1990s when News Corp was on its knees.”

The New York Times reported back in 2005 that Malone’s firm was “unlikely to unwind its investment in the News Corporation” because he considered “the stake in the News Corporation a long-term investment, meaning that the relationship between him and Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the News Corporation, was not likely to be dissolved any time soon.”

After acrimonious mid-decade negotiations that stretched out over two years, the media giants cobbled together a deal in 2006 resulting in a $11 billion asset swap, one that gave Liberty control of the DirectTV Group whilst helping Murdoch “tighten his grip” on News Corp., according to The New York Times.

Interestingly enough during those negotiations, investment banking firms Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase along with the white shoe law firm Hogan & Hartson advised News Corp., while Liberty was represented by Bear Stearns and the Baker Botts law firm, long time Bush family consiglieres.

All this can be chalked-up to an interesting set of coincidences. However, the high stakes involved and the relationships and connections forged over decades, including those amongst players who figured prominently in capitalism’s 2008 global economic crisis and Bush family corruption, cannot be ignored.

A Suspicious Death

Last week’s suspicious death of former NoW whistleblower Sean Hoare should set alarm bells ringing.

When the scandal broke, it was Hoare who told The New York Times last year that senior editors at NoW and another Murdoch tabloid, The Sun, actively encouraged staff to spy on celebrities and others, including victims of the London terror attacks, British soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq and the murdered teenager Milly Dowler; all in pursuit of “exclusives.”

The Guardian reported that Hoare said that “reporters at the NoW were able to use police technology to locate people using their mobile phone signals, in exchange for payments to police officers.”

“He said journalists were able to use ‘pinging’, which measured the distance between a mobile handset and a number of phone masts to pinpoint its location,” The Guardian revealed.

Hoare described “how reporters would ask a news desk executive to obtain the location of a target: “Within 15 to 30 minutes someone on the news desk would come back and say ‘Right, that’s where they are.’”

Quite naturally, this raises the question which “police technology” was used to massage NoW exclusives and which firms made a pretty penny selling their wares to police, allegedly for purposes of “fighting crime” and “counterterrorism”?

It was Hoare after all who told The New York Times just days before his death that when he worked for NoW “pinging cost the paper nearly $500 on each occasion.”

According to the Times, Hoare found out how the practice worked “when he was scrambling to find someone and was told that one of the news desk editors, Greg Miskiw, could help.”

The Times reports that Miskiw “asked for the person’s cellphone number, and returned later with information showing the person’s precise location in Scotland.”

An unnamed “former Scotland Yard officer” interviewed by the Times said “the individual” who provided confidential information to NoW and other Murdoch holdings “could have been one of a small group entitled to authorize pinging requests,” that is a senior counterterrorism officer charged with keeping the British public “safe.”

Hoare told the Times “the fact that it was a police officer was clear from his exchange with Mr. Miskiw.”

“‘I thought it was remarkable and asked him how he did it, and he said, ‘It’s the Old Bill, isn’t it?’”

“At that point, you don’t ask questions,” Hoare said.

Yet despite the relevance of the reporter’s death to the scandal, police claimed Hoare’s sudden demise was “unexplained but not thought to be suspicious.” Really?

As the World Socialist Web Site points out: “The statement is at the very least extraordinary, and at worst sinister in its implications.”

Left-wing journalist Chris Marsden wrote that “Hoare is the man who broke silence on the corrupt practices at the News of the World and, most specifically, alleged that former editor Andy Coulson, who later became Prime Minister David Cameron’s director of communications, was fully aware of phone hacking that took place on an ‘industrial scale’.”

Aside from the secret state, what other entities are capable of intercepting phone and other electronic communications on “an industrial scale”? Given Rupert Murdoch’s close ties to the political establishment on both sides of the Atlantic, is it a stretch to speculate that a “sympathetic” intelligence service wouldn’t do all they could to help a “friend,” particularly if cash payments were involved?

How could Hoare’s death not be viewed suspiciously?

Indeed, “the morning after Hoare’s body was found,” Mardsen writes, “former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson and his former deputy, John Yates, were to give evidence before a home affairs select committee. Stephenson had tendered his resignation Sunday and Yates Monday.”

Conveniently, for those with much to hide, including police, “the death of Hoare means that his testimony will never be heard by any such inquiry or, more importantly, by any criminal investigation that may arise.”

Yet, despite a pending coroner’s inquest into the exact cause of the reporter’s death, corporate media have rushed to judgement, labeling anyone who raise suspicions as being, what else, “conspiracy theorists.”

This despite the fact, as the World Socialist Web Site reported Saturday that information has surfaced “regarding the extent of News International links to known criminals.”

Indeed, on July 6 left-wing journalist Robert Stevens reported that “Labour MP Tom Watson told Parliament that News International chief executive and former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks ‘was present at a meeting with Scotland Yard when police officers pursuing a murder investigation provided her with evidence that her newspaper was interfering with the pursuit of justice’.”

“‘She was told of actions by people she paid to expose and discredit David Cook [a Detective Superintendent] and his wife Jackie Haines so that Mr. Cook would be prevented from completing an investigation into a murder’.

“Watson added,” Stevens writes, that “‘News International was paying people to interfere with police officers and were doing so on behalf of known criminals. We know now that News International had entered the criminal underworld’.”

Although Hoare had suffered from years of alcohol and cocaine abuse, he was in rehab and by all accounts on the road to recovery. Hoare could have died from natural causes but this has not yet been established.

Pending histology and toxicology tests which will take weeks, and a coroner’s inquest was adjourned July 21 until said test results were in, short of a definitive finding, nothing can nor should be ruled out, including murder, by a party or parties unknown.

While it would be a fatal exercise in rank stupidity for News Corp. to rub out Sean Hoare, would others, including police or organized crime figures caught up in the scandal and known to have been paid by News Corp. “people to interfere with police officers” and to have done so “on behalf of known criminals,” have such qualms?

An Open Question

We do not know if TruePosition sold LIMS to London’s Metropolitan Police, key players in the Murdoch hacking scandal, and the firm won’t say who they sell to.

However, whether they did or did not is a relevant question. That security firms develop and sell privacy-killing products and then wash their hands of responsibility how and by whom their products are used–for good or ill–is hardly irrelevant to victims of police repression or private corruption by entities such as News Corp.

The issue here are the actions taken by our corporate and political minders who believe that everything in terms of smashing down walls between public and private life is up for grabs, a commodity auctioned off to the highest bidder.

While we are told by high-tech firms out to feather their nests and politicians that “law enforcement” require we turn over all our data to police to “keep us safe,” the Murdoch scandal reveals precisely that it was police agencies corrupted by giant corporations which had allowed such criminal behavior to go unchecked for years.

And with Congress and Obama Justice Department officials pursuing legislation that will require mobile carriers to store and disclose cell-tower data to police and secret state agencies–all without benefit of a warrant, mind you–as well as encryption back doors built into the internet, we are reaching a point where a perfect storm threatens privacy well into the future, if not permanently.

A Looming Threat

Since LIMS 2008 introduction some 75,000 mobile towers in the U.S. have been equipped with the system, FoxNews, ironically enough, reported two years ago.

That same report informed us that “LOCINT continues to operate in Middle Eastern and Asia-Pacific nations where no legal restrictions exist for tracking cell phone signals.”

TruePosition’s marketing vice president Dominic Li told Fox “when you establish a geofence, anytime a mobile device enters the territory, our system will be alerted and provide a message to the customer.”

Li went on to say, “we realize that this has a lot of value to law enforcement agencies outside of search and rescue missions. It gives rise to a whole host of new solutions for national security.”

In keeping with the firm’s penchant for secrecy, risk averse when it comes to negative publicity over the civil liberties’ implications of their products, “citing security concerns,” Fox reported that “company officials declined to specify which countries currently use the technology.”

TruePosition claims that while wireless technology “has revolutionized communication” it has a “dark side” as “terrorists and criminals” exploit vulnerabilities to create “serious new threats to the security of nations worldwide.”

Touting their ability to combine “location determination and network data mining technologies,” TruePosition “offers government agencies, security experts and law enforcement officials powerful, carrier-grade security solutions with the power to defend against criminal and terrorist activity.”

Never mind that most of the “serious new threats” to global citizens’ rights come from unaccountable state security agencies and international financial cartels responsible for the greatest theft of resources in human history.

For interested parties such as TruePosition, “actionable intelligence” in the form of “data mining to monitor activity and behavior over time in order to build detailed profiles and identify others that they associate with,” will somehow, magically one might say, lead to the apprehension of “those who threaten the safety of citizens.”

Unasked is the question: who will protect us from those who develop and sell such privacy killing technologies?

Certainly not Congress which has introduced legislation “that would force Internet companies to log data about their customers,” CNET News reported earlier this month.

“As a homeland security tool,” Wired reported, LIMS is “enticing.” Brian Varano, TruePosition’s marketing director told Spencer Ackerman to “imagine an ‘invisible barrier around sensitive sites like critical infrastructure,’ such as oil refineries or power plants.”

“The barrier contains a list of known phones belonging to people who work there, allowing them to pass freely through the covered radius. ‘If any phone enters that is not on the authorized list, [authorities] are immediately notified,’” Varano told Wired.

While TruePosition’s technology may be useful when it comes to protecting nuclear installations and other critical infrastructure from unauthorized breaches and may be an important tool for investigators tracking down drug gangs, human traffickers, kidnappers and stalkers, as we have learned from the Murdoch scandal and the illegal driftnet surveillance of Americans, the potential that governments and private entities will abuse such powerful tools is also likely.

According to Wired while “TruePosition sells to mobile carriers,” the company is “cagey about whether the U.S. government uses its products.” Abroad however, Ackerman writes, “it sells to governments, which it won’t name. Ever since it came out with LOCINT in 2008,” Varano said that “‘Ministries of Defense and Interior from around the world began beating down our door’.”

That technological “quick fixes” such as LOCINT can augment the power of secret state agencies to “easily identify and monitor networks of dissidents,” doesn’t seem to trouble the firm in the least.

In fact, such concerns don’t even enter the equation. As Wired reported, the company “saw a growth market in a field” where such products would have extreme relevance: “the expanding, globalized field of homeland security.”

“It really was recession-proof,” Varano explained to Ackerman, “because in many parts of the world, the defense and security budgets have either maintained where they were or increased by a large percentage.”

Small comfort to victims of globalized surveillance and repression that in many places, including so-called “Western democracies,” are already an ubiquitous part of the political landscape.

Consider the ease with which police can deploy LIMS for monitoring dissidents, say anticapitalist activists, union leaders or citizen organizers fighting against the wholesale theft of publicly-owned infrastructure to well-connected corporations (Greece, Ireland or Spain for example) by governments knuckling-under to IMF/ECB demands for so-called “deficit reduction” schemes.

As Stephen Graham points out in his seminal book Cities Under Siege, “as the everyday spaces and systems of urban everyday life are colonized by militarized control technologies” and “notions of policing and war, domestic and foreign, peace and war become less distinct, there emerges a massive boom in a convergent industrial complex encompassing security, surveillance, military technology, prisons, corrections, and electronic entertainment.”

“It is no accident,” Graham writes, “that security-industrial complexes blossom in parallel with the diffusion of market fundamentalist notions for organizing social, economic and political life.”

Creating a climate of fear is key to those who seek to manage daily life. Thus the various media-driven panics surrounding nebulous, open-ended “wars” on “deficits,” “drugs,” “terror” and now “cyber-crime.”

That firms such as TruePosition and hundreds of others who step in to capitalize on the highly-profitable “homeland security” market, hope to continue flying under the radar, we would do well to recall U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who strongly admonished us that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Indeed, “hope and change” huckster Barack Obama had the temerity to assert that the President “bears no greater responsibility than ensuring the safety and security of the American people.”

Pity that others, including CIA “black site” prisoners tortured to death to “keep us safe” (some 100 at last count) aren’t extended the same courtesy as The Washington Post reported last week.

As Secrecy News editor Steven Aftergood correctly points out, the claim that the President “has no greater responsibility than ‘protecting the American people’ is a paternalistic invention that is historically unfounded and potentially damaging to the political heritage of the nation.”

Aftergood avers, “the presidential oath of office that is prescribed by the U.S. Constitution (Art. II, sect. 1) makes it clear that the President’s supreme responsibility is to ‘…preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ There is no mention of public safety. It is the constitutional order that the President is sworn to protect, even if doing so entails risks to the safety and security of the American people.”

But as our former republic slips ever-closer towards corporate dictatorship, Obama’s mendacious twaddle about “protecting the American people,” serves only to obscure, and reinforce, the inescapable fact that it’s a rigged game.

Rest assured, “what happens in Vegas,” Baghdad, Kabul or Manama–from driftnet spying to political-inspired witchhunts to illegal detention–won’t, and hasn’t, “stayed in Vegas.”

Cyber Here, Cyber There, Cyber-Surveillance Everywhere

Last month, researcher Barrett Brown and the OpMetalGear network lifted the lid on a new U.S. Government-sponsored cyber-surveillance project, Romas/COIN, now Odyssey, a multiyear, multimillion dollar enterprise currently run by defense and security giant Northrop Grumman.

With some $10.8 billion in revenue largely derived from contracts with the Defense Department, Northrop Grumman was No. 2 on the Washington Technology 2011 Top 100 List of Prime Federal Contractors.

“For at least two years,” Brown writes, “the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once.”

Information on this shadowy program was derived by scrutinizing hundreds of the more than 70,000 HBGary emails leaked onto the web by the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous.

Brown uncovered evidence that the “top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr–the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients.”

Readers will recall that Barr claimed he could exploit social media to gather information about WikiLeaks supporters in a bid to destroy that organization. Earlier this year, Barr told the Financial Times he had used scraping techniques and had infiltrated WikiLeaks supporter Anonymous, in part by using IRC, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

According to emails subsequently released by Anonymous, it was revealed that the ultra rightist U.S. Chamber of Commerce had hired white shoe law firm Hunton & Williams, and that Hunton attorneys, upon recommendation of an unnamed U.S. Department of Justice official, solicited a set of private security contractors–HBGary, HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico Technologies (collectively known as Team Themis)–and stitched-up a sabotage campaign against WikiLeaks, journalists, labor unions, progressive political groups and Chamber critics.

Amongst the firms who sought to grab the Romas/COIN/Odyssey contract from Northrop when it came up for a “recompete” was TASC, which describes itself as “a renowned provider of advanced systems engineering, integration and decision-support services across the intelligence, defense, homeland security and federal markets.”

According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, TASC’s head of “Cybersecurity Initiatives,” Larry Strang, was formerly a Vice President with Northrop Grumman who led that firm’s Cybersecurity Group and served as Northrop’s NSA Account Manager. Prior to that, Strang, a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel, was Vice President for Operations at the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

Brown relates that emails between TASC executives Al Pisani, John Lovegrow and former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr, provided details that they “were in talks with each other as well as Mantech executive Bob Frisbie on a ‘recompete’ pursuant to ‘counter intelligence’ operations that were already being conducted on behalf of the federal government by another firm, SAIC, with which they hoped to compete for contracts.”

In fact, HBGary Federal and TASC may have been cats-paws for defense giant ManTech International in the race to secure U.S. Government cyber-surveillance contracts. Clocking in at No. 22 on Washington Technology’s “2011 Top 100 list,” ManTech earned some $1.46 billion in 2010, largely derived from work in “systems engineering and integration, technology and software development, enterprise security architecture, intelligence operations support, critical infrastructure protection and computer forensics.” The firm’s major customers include the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s geek squad that is busily working to develop software for their Cyber Insider Threat (CINDER) program.

Both HBGary Federal and parent company HBGary, a California-based security firm run by the husband-wife team, Greg Hoglund and Penny Leavy, had been key players for the design of malware, undetectable rootkits and other “full directory exfiltration tools over TCP/IP” for the Defense Department according to documents released by the secret-shredding web site Public Intelligence.

Additional published documents revealed that they and had done so in close collaboration with General Dynamics (Project C and Task Z), which had requested “multiple protocols to be scoped as viable options … for VoIP (Skype) protocol, BitTorrent protocol, video over HTTP (port 80), and HTTPS (port 443)” for unnamed secret state agencies.

According to Brown, it appears that Romas/COIN/Odyssey was also big on social media surveillance, especially when it came to “Foreign Mobile” and “Foreign Web” monitoring. Indeed, documents published by Public Intelligence (scooped-up by the HBGary-Anonymous hack) was a ManTech International-HBGary collaboration describing plans for Internet Based Reconnaissance Operations. The October 2010 presentation described plans that would hand “customers,” presumably state intelligence agencies but also, as revealed by Anonymous, corporate security entities and public relations firms, the means to perform “native language searching” combined with “non-attributable architecture” and a “small footprint” that can be “as widely or narrowly focused as needed.”

ManTech and HBGary promised to provide customers the ability to “Locate/Profile Internet ‘Points of Interest’” on “individuals, companies, ISPs” and “organizations,” and would do so through “detailed network mapping” that will “identify registered networks and registered domains”; “Graphical network representation based on Active Hosts”; “Operating system and network application identification”; “Identification of possible perimeter defenses” through “Technology Research, Intelligence Gap Fill, Counterintelligence Research” and “Customer Public Image Assessment.”

The presentation described the social media monitoring process as one that would “employ highly skilled network professionals (read, ex-spooks and former military intelligence operatives) who will use “Non-attributable Internet access, custom developed toolsets and techniques, Native Language and in-country techniques” that “utilize foreign language search engines, mapping tools” and “iterative researching methodologies” for searching “Websites, picture sites, mapping sites/programs”; “Blogs and social networking sites”; “Forums and Bulletin Boards”; “Network Information: Whois, Trace Route, NetTroll, DNS”; “Archived and cached websites.”

Clients who bought into the ManTech-HBGary “product” were promised “Rapid Non-attributable Open Source Research Results”; “Sourced Research Findings”; “Triage level Analysis”; “Vulnerability Assessment” and “Graphical Network and Social Diagramming” via data mining and extensive link analysis.

Undoubtedly, readers recall this is precisely what the National Security Agency has been doing since the 1990s, if not earlier, through their electronic communications intercept program Echelon, a multibillion Pentagon project that conducted corporate espionage for American multinational firms as researcher Nicky Hager revealed in his 1997 piece for CovertAction Quarterly.

Other firms included in Lovegrove’s email to Barr indicate that the new Romas/COIN/Odyssey “team” was to have included: “TASC (PMO [Project Management Operations], creative services); HBGary (Strategy, planning, PMO); Akamai (infrastructure); Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning); Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics); Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services); Cipher (strategy, planning operations); PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic partners); Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development–long list of strategic partners); Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance–long list of strategic partners). We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app developers.”

Recall that AT&T is the NSA’s prime telecommunications partner in that agency’s illegal driftnet surveillance program and has been the recipient of “retroactive immunity” under the despicable FISA Amendments Act, a law supported by then-Senator Barack Obama. Also recall that the giant tech firm Apple was recently mired in scandal over reports that their mobile phone platform had, without their owners’ knowledge or consent, speared geolocational data from the iPhone and then stored this information in an Apple-controlled data base accessible to law enforcement through various “lawful interception” schemes.

“Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN,” Brown writes, “the firms that had been assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the program’s recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others that he’d spoken to the ‘CO [contracting officer] for COIN’.” The TASC executive told Barr that “the current procurement approach” was cancelled, citing “changed requirements.”

Apparently the Pentagon, or other unspecified secret state satrapy told the contestants that “an updated RFI [request for information]” will be issued soon. According to a later missive from Lovegrove to Barr, “COIN has been replaced by a procurement called Odyssey.” While it is still not entirely clear what Romas/COIN or the Odyssey program would do once deployed, Brown claims that “mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program.”

And given Barr’s monomaniacal obsession with social media surveillance (that worked out well with Anonymous!) the presence of Alterian and SocialEyez on the procurement team may indicate that the secret state is alarmed by the prospect that the “Arab Spring” just might slip from proverbial “safe hands” and threaten Gulf dictatorships and Saudi Arabia with the frightening specter of democratic transformation.

Although the email from TASC executive Chris Clair to John Lovegrow names “Alterion” as a company to contact because of their their “SM2 tool,” in all likelihood this is a typo given the fact that it is the UK-based firm “Alterian” that has developed said SM2 tool, described on their web site as a “business intelligence product that provides visibility into social media and lets you tap into a new kind of data resource; your customers’ direct thoughts and opinions.”

This would be a highly-profitable partnership indeed for enterprising intelligence agencies and opaque corporate partners intent on monitoring political developments across the Middle East.

In fact, a 2010 press release, announced that Alterian had forged a partnership with the Dubai-based firm SocialEyez for “the world’s first social media monitoring service designed for the Arab market.”

We’re informed that SocialEyez, a division of Media Watch Middle East, described as “the leading media monitoring service in the Middle East,” offers services in “television, radio, social media, online news and internet monitoring across most sectors including commercial, government and PR.”

That Barr and his partners were interested in bringing these firms to the Romas/COIN table is not surprising considering that the Alterian/SocialEyez deal promises “to develop and launch an Arabic language interface for Alterian SM2 to make it the world’s first Arab language social media monitoring tool.” Inquiring minds can’t help but wonder which three-lettered American agencies alongside a stable of “corporate and government clients, including leading Blue Chips” might be interested in “maximising their social media monitoring investment”?

Pentagon “Manhunters” in the House

On an even more sinister note, the inclusion of Archimedes Global on the Romas/COIN team should set alarm bells ringing.

Archimedes is a small, privately-held niche security firm headquartered in Tampa, Florida where, surprise, surprise, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) has it’s main headquarters at the MacDill Air Force Base. On their web site, Archimedes describes itself as “a diversified technology company providing energy and information solutions to government and businesses worldwide.” The firm claims that it “delivers solutions” to its clients by “combining deep domain expertise, multi-disciplinary education and training, and technology-enabled innovations.”

While short on information regarding what it actually does, evidence suggests that the firm is chock-a-block with former spooks and Special Forces operators, skilled in the black arts of counterintelligence, various information operations, subversion and, let’s be frank, tasks euphemistically referred to in the grisly trade as “wet work.”

According to The Washington Post, the firm was established in 2005. However, although the Post claims in their “Top Secret America” series that the number of employees and revenue is “unknown,” Dana Priest and William M. Arkin note that Archimedes have five government clients and are have speared contracts relating to “Ground forces operations,” “Human intelligence,” Psychological operations,” and “Specialized military operations.”

Brown relates that Archimedes was slated to provide “Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning” for the proposed Romas/COIN/Odyssey project for an unknown U.S. Government entity.

Based on available evidence however, one can speculate that Archimedes may have been chosen as part of the HBGary Federal/TASC team precisely because of their previous work as private contractors in human intelligence (HUMINT), running spies and infiltrating assets into organizations of interest to the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) throughout the Middle East, Central- and South Asia.

In 2009, Antifascist Calling revealed that one of Archimedes Global’s senior directors, retired Air Force Lt. Colonel George A. Crawford, published a chilling monograph, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organizing for Irregular Warfare, for the highly-influential Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.

JSOU is the “educational component” of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). With a mission that touts its ability to “plan and synchronize operations” against America’s geopolitical adversaries and rivals, JSOU’s Strategic Studies Department “advances SOF strategic influence by its interaction in academic, interagency, and United States military communities.”

Accordingly, Archimedes “information and risk” brief claim they can solve “the most difficult communication and risk problems by seeing over the horizon with a blend of art and science.” And with focus areas that include “strategic communications, media analysis and support, crisis communications, and risk and vulnerability assessment and mitigation,” it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to infer that those well-schooled in the dark art of information operations (INFOOPS) would find a friendly home inside the Romas/COIN contract team.

With some 25-years experience “as a foreign area officer specializing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia,” including a stint “as acting Air and Defense Attaché to Kyrgyzstan,” Crawford brings an interesting skill-set to the table. Crawford writes:

Manhunting–the deliberate concentration of national power to find, influence, capture, or when necessary kill an individual to disrupt a human network–has emerged as a key component of operations to counter irregular warfare adversaries in lieu of traditional state-on-state conflict measures. It has arguably become a primary area of emphasis in countering terrorist and insurgent opponents. (George A. Crawford, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare, JSOU Report 09-7, The JSOU Press, Hurlburt Field, Florida, September 2009, p. 1)

Acknowledged manhunting masters in their own right, the Israeli settler-colonial security apparat have perfected the art of “targeted killing,” when they aren’t dropping banned munitions such as white phosphorus on unarmed, defenseless civilian populations or attacking civilian vessels on the high seas.

Like their Israeli counterparts who come highly recommended as models of restraint, an American manhunting agency will employ similarly subtle, though no less lethal, tactics. Crawford informs us:

When compared with conventional force-on-force warfare, manhunting fundamentally alters the ratio between warfare’s respective firepower, maneuver, and psychological elements. Firepower becomes less significant in terms of mass, while the precision and discretion with which firepower is employed takes on tremendous significance, especially during influence operations. Why drop a bomb when effects operations or a knife might do? (Crawford, op. cit., p. 11, emphasis added)

Alongside actual shooters, “sensitive site exploitation (SSE) teams are critical operational components for Pentagon “manhunters.” We’re told that SSE teams will be assembled and able to respond on-call “in the event of a raid on a suspect site or to conduct independent ‘break-in and search’ operations without leaving evidence of their intrusion.” Such teams must possess “individual skills” such as “physical forensics, computer or electronic exploitation, document exploitation, investigative techniques, biometric collection, interrogation/debriefing and related skills.”

As if to drive home the point that the target of such sinister operations are the American people and world public opinion, Crawford, ever the consummate INFOOPS warrior, views “strategic information operations” as key to this murderous enterprise. Indeed, they “must be delicately woven into planned kinetic operations to increase the probability that a given operation or campaign will achieve its intended effect.”

Personnel skilled at conducting strategic information operations–to include psychological operations, public information, deception, media and computer network operations, and related activities–are important for victory. Despite robust DoD and Intelligence Community capabilities in this area, efforts to establish organizations that focus information operations have not been viewed as a positive development by the public or the media, who perceive government-sponsored information efforts with suspicion. Consequently, these efforts must take place away from public eyes. Strategic information operations may also require the establishment of regional or local offices to ensure dissemination of influence packages and assess their impact. Thus manhunting influence may call for parallel or independent structures at all levels…” (Crawford, op. cit., pp. 27-28, emphasis added)

While we do not as yet have a complete picture of the Romas/COIN/Odyssey project, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn.

“Altogether, then,” Brown writes, “a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms–capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence.”

Although Brown’s initial research concluded that Romas/COIN/Odyssey will operate “in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners,” with a firm like Archimedes on-board, once information has been assembled on individuals described in other contexts as “radicals” or “key extremists,” will they subsequently be made to “disappear” into the hands of “friendly” security services such as those of strategic U.S. partners Bahrain and Saudi Arabia?

We’re reminded that “Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means.”

Indeed, “none of the companies involved,” Brown writes, have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department’s decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct.”

Brown warns that “a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better ‘situational awareness’ on entire populations” while simultaneously manipulating “the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations.”

Beginning, it should be noted, right here at home…

He who is most noble is he who raises his voice for those silenced by oppression.
– Jonathan Azaziah¹

…the public wants what the public gets
– The Jam²

Twenty years ago when I first arrived in Japan I taught English to a Tokyo University associate professor in engineering. The young and normally reserved man sometimes complained about his boss who was a professor in nuclear engineering and gave him troublesome tasks at the office. I once asked him what he thought about earthquake-prone Japan using nuclear power and he replied, “it’s crazy.” Of course, Tokyo University is the hub of Japan’s nuclear power industry and most executives for TEPCO are graduates (as are many top politicians) from Japan’s most elite university.

Today, “four out of five Japanese want to see Tokyo abandon nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima atomic crisis…”³ But any professional in industry, government or media would have no chance of career advancement if they spoke out against nuclear power. This problem is well documented in an article from Speigel, the German news magazine, which details the insidious and poisonous nuclear tentacles that penetrate the most important aspects of Japanese society.⁴

As a recent Japanese news editorial points out, a small cabal of criminals think they literally own the country and will not allow democracy or the free market to interfere with their aims to control the energy system:

[I]n adopting a scheme for paying damages to the victims of the accidents at Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the government has ended up guaranteeing the survival of Tokyo Electric Power Co. the operator of the stricken plant. Radioactive substances from Tepco’s Fukushima No. 1 plant have contaminated surrounding cities, farms, forests and the ocean….

The federation’s staunch opposition to separation of generation and transmission was shown in its rejection of adoption of the “Smart Grid” system that the U.S. is eager to promote — a electricity network that can efficiently and stably deliver electricity supplies by intelligently integrating the behavior of power generation entities and power users. The federation quibbled, saying the Japanese transmission system was “already smart enough.” It fears that the Smart Grid might open the way for outsiders to enter the electricity market, thus breaking the monopoly of the nation’s 10 utilities….

The power industry is also reluctant to build facilities to change the frequency of the alternating currents, so that electricity generated in the western half of the country, where electricity’s frequency is 60 hertz, can be transmitted to the eastern half of Japan where electricity’s frequency is 50 hertz, or vice versa — even though such interchangeability would inevitably reduce regional imbalances of supply….This reluctance is based on a fear that the interchangeability issue may strengthen the argument for separation of power generation and transmission.⁵

About ten years ago I attended a press conference on the dangers of Japan’s nuclear power stations, which was held at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo. It was well attended due to the deadly Tokaimura nuclear accident which had just occurred in 1999. An audience member asked Kenji Higuchi — a journalist and teacher who has written several books about the dangers of nuclear power — why a documentary film about him and the dangers to Japan’s nuke workers, Nuclear Ginza,⁶ was not allowed to be shown on Japan’s government news station, NHK. “It was squashed from the top down.” I have shown the film many times over the years to my university students, but I can’t reach millions of people.

Fast forward to June of 2011 when Higuchi gave a lecture at a small but prestigious college in Tokyo. One conscientious Japanese professor at that college has been alerting his students to the nuke issue and promoting Higuchi’s books. My contact who attended the meeting of only 10 people said that it was Higuchi’s belief that he was not allowed a larger venue because he is too direct in his speaking manner and names the companies that are complicit with the Nuclear Industry. The students’s parents who work for some of those companies might not like hearing such bold criticisms. Higuchi also surmised that the government has implicitly threatened universities not to touch on the nuclear issue in any critical way, such as allowing anti-nuke rallies on their campuses.

I teach part-time at this particular college and have freely published many articles there, but for the first time my submission which was to be on the nuke disaster was turned down because the issue was deemed “too sensitive.” It is noteworthy that one of the more academically open, meaty and progressive-minded schools in Tokyo is now telling people to keep their mouths shut. When I wrote a reply to the editor asking that if I would submit to peer review they would still consider my article, I received no response.

At another school which has an elite science and engineering department, my first year students have responded well to my cynical jokes about nuclear power. When I open the windows in the morning and say, “hey let’s let in the fresh air and radiation, it’s good for you,” everyone nervously chuckles while shaking their heads. The students provide very sensible and conscientious written comments to the articles I give them to read about the nuclear situation.

On the other hand, by second year many students realize that if they are in certain fields of study, it will not do well for their careers to criticize nuclear power. When we had discussions about energy issues, many gave articulate defenses of the various forms alternative energies available and how they should be developed– but in the end some groups said, “but we still think nuclear is the best!”

There is another aspect to this problem, it is simply “air headedness.” When choosing topics for presentations, some groups came up with the uninspiring and disputatious topic of “global warming,” while others choose “beer,” “chocolate,” “television,” and so on. Not real substantive stuff. One teacher suggested to me the reason many students to do not want to think about Fukushima is because Japan previously considered itself superior to its neighbors and has now taken it on the chin. This is sore subject for Japanese pride and Fukushima was a rude awakening reminding Japanese that they are merely human after all. Another explanation may be more postmodern and universal: 3D-HDTV = Triple Dumbing – High Deafening Talmud Vision. Too much “bread and circuses” and “dread and circumcision” has damaged our humanity and empathy for nature and others.

The censorship of critics of the Nuke Industry can be seen at all levels. For example, even “[a] government official who released a book on May 20 criticizing the government’s response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster has been asked to leave his post…. [Mr.]Koga has… pushed for changes to the country’s energy policy, such as a separation of electric power generation and transmission fiercely opposed by power companies…”⁷ Obviously this fellow was looking for an early retirement and was “asked” to leave his prestigious career for telling the truth.

In the meantime, as the Fukushima nuclear reactors which have had “corium” meltdowns continue to irradiate the nearby environment– which ultimately puts all of Japan’s inhabitants in danger– we are being told to “forget about it and go back to sleep.” Yet we can see many hopeful signs of concerned citizens nationwide organizing to address the dangers of spreading radiation and to eventually put an end to nuclear power generation in Japan.

1. Mask of Zion
2. The Jam – Going Underground
3. Most Japanese wish to scrap reactors
4. Japan’s Nuclear Cartel
5. Power industry’s chokehold
6. Nuclear Ginza Japan’s secret at-risk labor force
7. Ministry official who released book criticizing gov’t over nuke crisis asked to resign

Pete Rose’s birthday. Lindsey Lohan’s arrest record. The half-life of an isotope. It is all just numbers and stuff! But the last one can give you a tool to know when you are being lied to about matters of life and death; that is, if you want to know when you are being lied to.

The world, as our senses perceive it, is made of the naturally occurring elements – roughly 92 elements with a couple of them in a sort of grey area because of that half-life thing. ¹ An element has two distinctly different sets of properties depending on what parts of the atom of that element are being considered: chemical properties and nuclear properties. Chemical properties have to do with how the element interacts with other elements. Two or more elements may combine to make a compound; and so the many elements can combine to form the millions of different substances that make up the stuff of our world. ²

But at the center of each atom of each element is the nucleus or a core where the greatest mass of the element is contained. The number of protons, positively charged particles, in the nucleus determines what kind of element it is: oxygen has 8 protons, iron has 26 protons, uranium has 92 protons. Also in the nucleus are neutrons, particles much like protons with no electrical charge; it is the architecture of the proton/neutron structure that determines whether the nucleus will be strong like a well-made and mortared brick wall or easily disturbed like a pile of poorly stacked bricks. This structure of the nucleus has basically nothing to do with the chemical properties of the element.

Imagine a large parking lot with a thousand piles of bricks, poorly stacked. The first day you look at the lot, all the piles are intact. After several days (weeks) you notice that some bricks have fallen from some of the piles. After several years many of the piles have lost their original structure. It is easy to imagine that in a few hundred years, the piles would be bumps in a field of bricks. If, rather than piles, the bricks had been made into solid walls they would be unchanged in that length of time. This is the difference between an unstable atomic nucleus and a stable one.

Radioactive isotopes are the result of an unstable nucleus, but rather than a brick dropping to the ground when the pile is disturbed, the nucleus breaks up explosively – like a tightly wound spring – and pieces fly off at great speed, at or approaching the speed of light. It is these little pieces, and the huge amounts of energy that they carry, that make radioactive isotopes both useful and dangerous. ³

This is the first basic understanding needed to grasp the situation facing specifically Japan, and any other place that attempts to use controlled nuclear reactions. The second basic understanding involves numbers – really big numbers of really tiny things.

Put about 2 drops of water on your hand – really do it. See how that little bit of water is not even enough to puddle. Rub your hands together and in a moment the water is gone and you hands are dry. Do you know how many molecules of water there were on your hand? More than the number of stars in the entire total universe – and three times that many atoms – more than 10 billion trillion molecules of water.

Now imagine that 1% of the molecules in those 2 drops were radioactive (contained isotopes that might decay explosively): that would mean that there were 100 million trillion radioactively unstable atoms. Let’s say that you didn’t put two drops, but that only 100th of that amount of 1% radioactive water misted onto your hand: that would mean that there were (only) a million trillion radioactively unstable atoms on your hand.

A dust particle containing radioactive iodine or cesium can be millions of trillions of atoms. Lodged in lungs, the isotopes decay over time and some of the little pieces flying off explosively strike the structures of nearby living cells sometimes killing the cells, sometimes hitting the DNA; and sometimes striking the DNA in such a way that the cell is not killed but loses its bearings, goes rogue and reproduces outside of the body’s control.

Our human intuition is useless in the domain of the Big (and Tiny) Numbers. Certainty and uncertainty are turned on their head. A particle of dust that you would only see with the greatest attention can contain a trillion million radioactive nuclei with a half-life that result in 100 atomic nuclei decaying (exploding) on average every second (8,644,000 a day and thousands of millions in 25 years). These are monkeys typing Shakespeare numbers. The ‘impossible’ becomes certainty. A lung with only one particle too small to see has a good chance of one or more of its cells eventually being damaged in such a way that it will become cancerous. Perhaps the immune system will find it, perhaps not. Imagine a 100 pieces of dust, a thousand. Look at the light streaming in a window; watch the dust dance on the air.

With these understandings it is possible to make some sense from the ‘radioactive cloud’ of bull-shit spreading from Fukushima nuclear plants and Tepco corporate offices. First and immediately heart-rending is that the men (I assume that they are only men) working in the plant facilities are dead men; only weeks or months of life left for some or even most them. Second, many millions of people will be effected, especially in the region, but also all over the world. When the epidemiological studies are done (if they are done), specific long-term cancer rate patterns will follow the emission and weather patterns occurring over the next weeks, months and years.

And perhaps the saddest of all; it is possible to know these things. A competent understanding of chemistry would prevent the lies being told – even in the beginning before the plants were built. A little general knowledge of geology would make the locations at Fukushima, Diablo canyon, and San Onofre (last two on the San Andres fault system in California) unlikely locations even if a knowledgeable public could be convinced that nuclear generation of electricity was a good idea.

The situational sociopaths and actual psychopaths that are willing to endanger all living things for a little power (both political and material) will always be with us and unaddressable with normal human concerns – that is what the pathology part means. Public awareness is perhaps the only guiding and governing force.

I had a student once who “couldn’t” learn math or science, but who could tell the exact familial relation of 300 people to her and to each other in her extended family; that is what mattered to her. I in no way diminish the importance of being the teenage ‘grandmother’ to her family, but she could have learned anything. There isn’t 50 pounds of learning and 30 pounds used up on the relatives.

What she taught me is that we must believe in the importance of what there is to learn. We are at the mercy of the situational sociopaths unless we know enough to recognize their half-truths and lies. The only way I can see to bring these two statements together is for everyone who sees the third element of the syllogism (that we must come to see as important the learning that will protect our human and living interests in the face of economic and political interests) to go out of their way to inform the public mind of the importance of knowing enough not to be lied to.

The reactors are burning: the uranium and plutonium are on their own now that we have concentrated them, stuffed them into tight quarters and then lost control. The nuclear material will not be brought to heel; that is another lie. That we were ever actually in control of the process is another one. But We let it happen. Our willing ignorance and greed for ease let it happen. We need to learn enough about the world that we actually live in to actually live in it.

1. Half-life is not a difficult idea. It is the measure of the length of time it takes for one form of an element to “go bad”, that is, for it to breakdown. One form (isotope) of an element may take 20 minutes for ½ of the amount that is there to turn into something else (breakdown). Another might take 1000 years for ½ of the amount that is there to breakdown, while a third form of an element might take a billion years for ½ of the amount there to breakdown. The first has a half-life of 20 minutes, the second has a half-life of a 1000 years and the third has a half-life of a billion years. The first will be almost completely gone (turned into other stuff) in a few hours, the second gone in a few tens of thousands of years and the third will take “forever” to go away. The first is considered very unstable, the second is unstable and the third is a stable isotope (but radioactive).
2. Atom – the unit of an element; made of a nucleus (protons and neutrons) in the middle surrounded by electrons equal in number to the number of protons. Electrons are about 2000 times smaller than protons, but have a negative charge exactly equal to and opposite of the positive charge of the proton.

   Isotope – a form of an atom with a specific number of neutrons. The same element can be represented by several different isotopes: atoms, all with the same number of protons and electrons, but with different numbers of neutrons. Because of the differing numbers of neutrons, the nucleus of different isotopes of the same element have different structures and are therefore often more or less stable than the other isotopes of the same element.

3. Three different ‘pieces’ can be ejected explosively from a decaying atomic nucleus. Some isotopes produce all three and some predominantly only one or two; depends on the architecture of the nucleus. They are: gamma rays and other high-energy electromagnetic radiation, alpha particles (positively charged high energy helium nucleus, made of 2 protons and 2 neutrons) and beta particles (high energy negatively charged electrons or positrons).