PLEASE TAKE THIS ASSAULT ON YOUR LIBERTIES SERIOUSLY. WHETHER IT IS THIS SURVEILLANCE OR IT IS THE POLICE BRUTALITY AND ILLEGAL ACTIONS....MARYLAND ELECTED OFFICIALS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ALLOWING ALL THIS TO HAPPEN!
Do you hear Mary Pat Clarke, Maggie McIntosh, or Barbara Mikulski shouting loudly against all of the illegal activities happening in Maryland and Baltimore? Do you hear O'Malley, Brown, Mizeur, or Gansler shouting loudly that all this is illegal? Then why do you vote for them? Why are you not running candidates in all primaries to replace these people with 3 MONKEY SYNDROME!!!! Do you really want people who SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL, AND SPEAK NO EVIL?
'I have no voice says Bill Richardson', Baltimore City Council.
This article is LOL as it talks of repressive regimes Balkanizing the internet. WHAT IN THE WORLD IS THIS US ACTION IF NOT REPRESSIVE?
Did you notice that all of the world's response to this had governments immediately seek to protect citizens from spying? These leaders may not have cared while it was secret but at least the responded with concerns for the citizens when it was made public. No talk of concerns for the public's loss of all privacy on the internet in the US. These same global corporations that have earned hundreds of billions spying and selling the personal data of the public are FILLED WITH MORAL OUTRAGE THAT THEIR ABILITY TO EARN PROFITS WILL BE RUINED. DON'T WORRY......OBAMA WILL HAVE THE TAXPAYERS PAY FOR ALL PROFITS LOST I AM SURE!
More NSA Spying Fallout: Brazilian President Snubs Obama Invitation, May Trigger Internet Balkanization
from the this-is-getting-serious dept A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt noted that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, was angry that the NSA had been reading her private emails and text messages, and that as a result she was contemplating cancelling an imminent high-profile state visit to the US. That was before the recent revelations that the NSA had also engaged in industrial espionage at the biggest Brazilian company, Petrobras, which seems to have been the final straw: Rousseff has now formally "postponed" her trip to the US, according to the Brazilian news site O Globo (original in Portuguese.)
Despite the framing that this is merely a "postponement" until the US has provided satisfactory explanations of the NSA's behavior, it's a real slap in the face for President Obama -- in the past, no national leader would dream of snubbing the US in this way -- and a measure of how seriously the NSA's activities are affecting US standing in the world. But this is not just about symbolic actions like cancelling high-level meetings: there are also likely to be longer-term repercussions for both US companies and the whole Internet.
For example, Rousseff is making a speech next week at the opening session of the UN General Assembly in New York. According to O Globo, she will raise the issue of American spying there, and call for a ban on espionage conducted by means of the Internet. Meanwhile, an Associated Press story published by the Washington Post has some details of other actions that Rousseff intends to take in an effort to protect Brazilians from online snooping in the future:
Most of Brazil's global Internet traffic passes through the United States, so Rousseff's government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network free of U.S. eavesdropping. Of course, the problem is that then it will be the UK's GCHQ and other European agencies that start spying on Brazilian traffic, rather than the NSA. Here's another idea that the President of Brazil wants to see realised: Rousseff is urging Brazil's Congress to compel Facebook, Google and all companies to store data generated by Brazilians on servers physically located inside Brazil in order to shield it from the NSA.
If that happens, and other nations follow suit, Silicon Valley's bottom line could be hit by lost business and higher operating costs: Brazilians rank No. 3 on Facebook and No. 2 on Twitter and YouTube. Whether or not that helps to secure the personal data of Brazilians, such a move will almost certainly increase the costs for US Internet companies operating in Brazil -- more bad news for them, all thanks to the NSA. But there may be even worse in store for the Internet as a whole, as the AP article points out: The effort by Latin America's biggest economy to digitally isolate itself from U.S. spying not only could be costly and difficult, it could encourage repressive governments to seek greater technical control over the Internet to crush free expression at home, experts say. This is just what many people feared: that the leaks about the NSA's massive surveillance activities around the world -- including economic espionage -- will provide the pretext repressive regimes need in order to take complete technical control of the Internet in their countries, rather than continuing to acquiesce in its global governance, as at present. And so all the efforts by Western countries at the recent World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) to stop precisely that kind of balkanization will have been in vain.
_______________________________________
Isn't it interesting how the NSA whistle blowers come from Maryland? That's because Maryland is ground zero for the NSA spying and Johns Hopkins is as much.
This article states the obvious-----WE HAVE POLITICIANS OPENLY LYING TO CONGRESS AND TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, WE HAVE AIDING AND ABETTING BY POLITICIANS, WE HAVE PROFITEERING BY POLITICIANS AND WE HAVE NO PUBLIC JUSTICE.
Again, I want to shout that the damage it to the citizens and the assault against the US Constitution and not US corporations losing markets. The American people need to pursue all of this until justice occurs and make a mantra of loses in wealth and liberty!
NSA Spying: Whistleblowers Claim Vindication On Surveillance State Warnings
Posted: 06/06/2013 8:30 pm EDT | Updated: 06/06/2013 9:19 pm EDT Huffington Post
For years, four former National Security Agency analysts warned that the government was conducting widespread surveillance on domestic communications. Their warnings were largely ignored.
But on Thursday, after The Guardian newspaper reported that Verizon was turning over customer phone records to the intelligence agency as part of a secret court order, Kirk Wiebe had a “feeling of great gratification.”
“What we've been saying all along has proven to be so," the 68-year-old whistleblower told The Huffington Post. "Our worst fears are being realized.”
While at the NSA, Wiebe, along with Ed Loomis and Bill Binney, created a computer program that could isolate large amounts of information collected by the NSA while protecting Americans’ privacy. But the NSA ignored their program, saying “it was too invasive,” Loomis said.
"We had a solution to this entire problem that would have avoided this whole mess," Wiebe said.
Instead, the NSA chose Trailblazer, a multi-billion dollar computer program that was supposed to revolutionize how the agency analyzed communications data. Wiebe, Loomis and Binney called for an investigation into Trailblazer, citing massive waste and fraud.
In response, Binney and Wiebe were accused of leaking classified information to the press. The FBI raided their homes. Still, they continued to speak publicly about their concerns about the NSA invading Americans' privacy.
On Thursday, they had a moment of vindication as they gave interviews criticizing the NSA over a domestic surveillance program they had been warning about.
“This would appear to be the hardcore evidence that I think a lot of people needed to start to believe it,” Binney, who was at the NSA for nearly 40 years, told The Huffington Post. “It’s domestic spying, that’s what it is, on a very large scale.”
A fourth NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, criticized the court that authorized the surveillance.
“There is no need to call this the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” Drake said in an interview with Democracy Now on Thursday. “Let’s just call it the surveillance court. It’s no longer about foreign intelligence. It’s simply about harvesting millions and millions and millions of phone call records and beyond.”
Wiebe said the NSA does not need to collect all Verizon customer phone calls to fight terrorism. He said the agency was overreaching in its investigation of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers.
"If someone tells me some guy named Tsarnaev is worrisome, why would I go to the phone companies and get all the phone calls?” Wiebe said. “Ninety-nine percent of those are going to be innocent human beings."
The NSA, Wiebe said, “has got innocent people mixed in a lousy process."
Loomis said NSA Director Keith Alexander and Attorney General Eric Holder have not been truthful in their congressional testimony about the government’s domestic surveillance program.
“People are lying to Congress, and they need to be fired,” Loomis said. “Alexander needs to be fired. Eric Holder needs to be fired. They need to have criminal charges filed against them for committing perjury.”
Loomis, now 70, lives in Baltimore and spends his retirement kayaking. He said he plans to sell his house and move to Florida.
Although he was vindicated on Thursday, he was no longer relaxed. The latest news about the NSA's surveillance program “has really gotten by blood pressure up," he said.
“Why do you need to trample on the Constitution for this crazy war on terror?” Loomis said.
___________________________________________
We have a real World War 2 drama unraveling as Wall Street and Germany's Deutsche Bank compete for which can steal more of the world's wealth and now with this surveillance we see citizens returning to that age of Fascism for comparison.
US mainstream media shout 'no one trusts the US anymore', speaking of world leaders. More importantly, the American people do not trust the US government anymore!
Germany cancels surveillance pact with US
The July 8, 2013 file photo shows the former monitoring base of the U.S. intelligence organization National Security Agency (NSA) in Bad Aibling, near Munich.Fri Aug 2, 2013 2:51PM
Germany says it has canceled its surveillance agreement with the US and Britain following the revelations by the former contractor to National Security Agency (NSA) Edward Snowden about Washington’s mass spying program worldwide.
The agreement dated back to 1960s and allowed Washington and London to carry out spying operations in German territory to protect their troops there.
Germany's Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, in a statement, described the cancelation as “a necessary and proper consequence of the recent debate about protecting personal privacy.”
Just weeks ahead of the country’s national elections, the German government has been under pressure from the public and the opposition parties over its cooperation with White House’s controversial surveillance program which also targeted German citizens.
Meanwhile, a statement from the British Foreign Office said the German measure is not significant because the agreement has not been used since 1990.
"It's a loose end from a previous era which is right to tie up," said the statement.
A German official also told the AP that the move was symbolic. The official, who declined to be named, added that ending the agreement would not affect the intelligence cooperation between Berlin and its allies.
The revelations by Snowden sparked strong and angry reactions among Germans. Many civil rights activists drew a parallel between the NSA spying program and the activities of the secret police during the communist East Germany and the Nazi era.
Do you hear Mary Pat Clarke, Maggie McIntosh, or Barbara Mikulski shouting loudly against all of the illegal activities happening in Maryland and Baltimore? Do you hear O'Malley, Brown, Mizeur, or Gansler shouting loudly that all this is illegal? Then why do you vote for them? Why are you not running candidates in all primaries to replace these people with 3 MONKEY SYNDROME!!!! Do you really want people who SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL, AND SPEAK NO EVIL?
'I have no voice says Bill Richardson', Baltimore City Council.
This article is LOL as it talks of repressive regimes Balkanizing the internet. WHAT IN THE WORLD IS THIS US ACTION IF NOT REPRESSIVE?
Did you notice that all of the world's response to this had governments immediately seek to protect citizens from spying? These leaders may not have cared while it was secret but at least the responded with concerns for the citizens when it was made public. No talk of concerns for the public's loss of all privacy on the internet in the US. These same global corporations that have earned hundreds of billions spying and selling the personal data of the public are FILLED WITH MORAL OUTRAGE THAT THEIR ABILITY TO EARN PROFITS WILL BE RUINED. DON'T WORRY......OBAMA WILL HAVE THE TAXPAYERS PAY FOR ALL PROFITS LOST I AM SURE!
More NSA Spying Fallout: Brazilian President Snubs Obama Invitation, May Trigger Internet Balkanization
from the this-is-getting-serious dept A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt noted that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, was angry that the NSA had been reading her private emails and text messages, and that as a result she was contemplating cancelling an imminent high-profile state visit to the US. That was before the recent revelations that the NSA had also engaged in industrial espionage at the biggest Brazilian company, Petrobras, which seems to have been the final straw: Rousseff has now formally "postponed" her trip to the US, according to the Brazilian news site O Globo (original in Portuguese.)
Despite the framing that this is merely a "postponement" until the US has provided satisfactory explanations of the NSA's behavior, it's a real slap in the face for President Obama -- in the past, no national leader would dream of snubbing the US in this way -- and a measure of how seriously the NSA's activities are affecting US standing in the world. But this is not just about symbolic actions like cancelling high-level meetings: there are also likely to be longer-term repercussions for both US companies and the whole Internet.
For example, Rousseff is making a speech next week at the opening session of the UN General Assembly in New York. According to O Globo, she will raise the issue of American spying there, and call for a ban on espionage conducted by means of the Internet. Meanwhile, an Associated Press story published by the Washington Post has some details of other actions that Rousseff intends to take in an effort to protect Brazilians from online snooping in the future:
Most of Brazil's global Internet traffic passes through the United States, so Rousseff's government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network free of U.S. eavesdropping. Of course, the problem is that then it will be the UK's GCHQ and other European agencies that start spying on Brazilian traffic, rather than the NSA. Here's another idea that the President of Brazil wants to see realised: Rousseff is urging Brazil's Congress to compel Facebook, Google and all companies to store data generated by Brazilians on servers physically located inside Brazil in order to shield it from the NSA.
If that happens, and other nations follow suit, Silicon Valley's bottom line could be hit by lost business and higher operating costs: Brazilians rank No. 3 on Facebook and No. 2 on Twitter and YouTube. Whether or not that helps to secure the personal data of Brazilians, such a move will almost certainly increase the costs for US Internet companies operating in Brazil -- more bad news for them, all thanks to the NSA. But there may be even worse in store for the Internet as a whole, as the AP article points out: The effort by Latin America's biggest economy to digitally isolate itself from U.S. spying not only could be costly and difficult, it could encourage repressive governments to seek greater technical control over the Internet to crush free expression at home, experts say. This is just what many people feared: that the leaks about the NSA's massive surveillance activities around the world -- including economic espionage -- will provide the pretext repressive regimes need in order to take complete technical control of the Internet in their countries, rather than continuing to acquiesce in its global governance, as at present. And so all the efforts by Western countries at the recent World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) to stop precisely that kind of balkanization will have been in vain.
_______________________________________
Isn't it interesting how the NSA whistle blowers come from Maryland? That's because Maryland is ground zero for the NSA spying and Johns Hopkins is as much.
This article states the obvious-----WE HAVE POLITICIANS OPENLY LYING TO CONGRESS AND TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, WE HAVE AIDING AND ABETTING BY POLITICIANS, WE HAVE PROFITEERING BY POLITICIANS AND WE HAVE NO PUBLIC JUSTICE.
Again, I want to shout that the damage it to the citizens and the assault against the US Constitution and not US corporations losing markets. The American people need to pursue all of this until justice occurs and make a mantra of loses in wealth and liberty!
NSA Spying: Whistleblowers Claim Vindication On Surveillance State Warnings
Posted: 06/06/2013 8:30 pm EDT | Updated: 06/06/2013 9:19 pm EDT Huffington Post
For years, four former National Security Agency analysts warned that the government was conducting widespread surveillance on domestic communications. Their warnings were largely ignored.
But on Thursday, after The Guardian newspaper reported that Verizon was turning over customer phone records to the intelligence agency as part of a secret court order, Kirk Wiebe had a “feeling of great gratification.”
“What we've been saying all along has proven to be so," the 68-year-old whistleblower told The Huffington Post. "Our worst fears are being realized.”
While at the NSA, Wiebe, along with Ed Loomis and Bill Binney, created a computer program that could isolate large amounts of information collected by the NSA while protecting Americans’ privacy. But the NSA ignored their program, saying “it was too invasive,” Loomis said.
"We had a solution to this entire problem that would have avoided this whole mess," Wiebe said.
Instead, the NSA chose Trailblazer, a multi-billion dollar computer program that was supposed to revolutionize how the agency analyzed communications data. Wiebe, Loomis and Binney called for an investigation into Trailblazer, citing massive waste and fraud.
In response, Binney and Wiebe were accused of leaking classified information to the press. The FBI raided their homes. Still, they continued to speak publicly about their concerns about the NSA invading Americans' privacy.
On Thursday, they had a moment of vindication as they gave interviews criticizing the NSA over a domestic surveillance program they had been warning about.
“This would appear to be the hardcore evidence that I think a lot of people needed to start to believe it,” Binney, who was at the NSA for nearly 40 years, told The Huffington Post. “It’s domestic spying, that’s what it is, on a very large scale.”
A fourth NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, criticized the court that authorized the surveillance.
“There is no need to call this the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” Drake said in an interview with Democracy Now on Thursday. “Let’s just call it the surveillance court. It’s no longer about foreign intelligence. It’s simply about harvesting millions and millions and millions of phone call records and beyond.”
Wiebe said the NSA does not need to collect all Verizon customer phone calls to fight terrorism. He said the agency was overreaching in its investigation of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers.
"If someone tells me some guy named Tsarnaev is worrisome, why would I go to the phone companies and get all the phone calls?” Wiebe said. “Ninety-nine percent of those are going to be innocent human beings."
The NSA, Wiebe said, “has got innocent people mixed in a lousy process."
Loomis said NSA Director Keith Alexander and Attorney General Eric Holder have not been truthful in their congressional testimony about the government’s domestic surveillance program.
“People are lying to Congress, and they need to be fired,” Loomis said. “Alexander needs to be fired. Eric Holder needs to be fired. They need to have criminal charges filed against them for committing perjury.”
Loomis, now 70, lives in Baltimore and spends his retirement kayaking. He said he plans to sell his house and move to Florida.
Although he was vindicated on Thursday, he was no longer relaxed. The latest news about the NSA's surveillance program “has really gotten by blood pressure up," he said.
“Why do you need to trample on the Constitution for this crazy war on terror?” Loomis said.
___________________________________________
We have a real World War 2 drama unraveling as Wall Street and Germany's Deutsche Bank compete for which can steal more of the world's wealth and now with this surveillance we see citizens returning to that age of Fascism for comparison.
US mainstream media shout 'no one trusts the US anymore', speaking of world leaders. More importantly, the American people do not trust the US government anymore!
Germany cancels surveillance pact with US
The July 8, 2013 file photo shows the former monitoring base of the U.S. intelligence organization National Security Agency (NSA) in Bad Aibling, near Munich.Fri Aug 2, 2013 2:51PM
Germany says it has canceled its surveillance agreement with the US and Britain following the revelations by the former contractor to National Security Agency (NSA) Edward Snowden about Washington’s mass spying program worldwide.
The agreement dated back to 1960s and allowed Washington and London to carry out spying operations in German territory to protect their troops there.
Germany's Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, in a statement, described the cancelation as “a necessary and proper consequence of the recent debate about protecting personal privacy.”
Just weeks ahead of the country’s national elections, the German government has been under pressure from the public and the opposition parties over its cooperation with White House’s controversial surveillance program which also targeted German citizens.
Meanwhile, a statement from the British Foreign Office said the German measure is not significant because the agreement has not been used since 1990.
"It's a loose end from a previous era which is right to tie up," said the statement.
A German official also told the AP that the move was symbolic. The official, who declined to be named, added that ending the agreement would not affect the intelligence cooperation between Berlin and its allies.
The revelations by Snowden sparked strong and angry reactions among Germans. Many civil rights activists drew a parallel between the NSA spying program and the activities of the secret police during the communist East Germany and the Nazi era.
RSS Feed
