TOKYO MASTER BANNER

MINISTRY OF TOKYO
US-ANGLO CAPITALISMEU-NATO IMPERIALISM
Illegitimate Transfer of Inalienable European Rights via Convention(s) & Supranational Bodies
Establishment of Sovereignty-Usurping Supranational Body Dictatorships
Enduring Program of DEMOGRAPHICS WAR on Europeans
Enduring Program of PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR on Europeans
Enduring Program of European Displacement, Dismemberment, Dispossession, & Dissolution
No wars or conditions abroad (& no domestic or global economic pretexts) justify government policy facilitating the invasion of ancestral European homelands, the rape of European women, the destruction of European societies, & the genocide of Europeans.
U.S. RULING OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR TO SALVAGE HEGEMONY
[LINK | Article]

*U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR* | U.S. Empire's Casino Unsustainable | Destabilised U.S. Monetary & Financial System | U.S. Defaults Twice A Year | Causes for Global Financial Crisis of 2008 Remain | Financial Pyramids Composed of Derivatives & National Debt Are Growing | *U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR* | U.S. Empire's Casino Unsustainable | Destabilised U.S. Monetary & Financial System | U.S. Defaults Twice A Year | Causes for Global Financial Crisis of 2008 Remain | Financial Pyramids Composed of Derivatives & National Debt Are Growing | *U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR*

Who's preaching world democracy, democracy, democracy? —Who wants to make free people free?
[info from Craig Murray video appearance, follows]  US-Anglo Alliance DELIBERATELY STOKING ANTI-RUSSIAN FEELING & RAMPING UP TENSION BETWEEN EASTERN EUROPE & RUSSIA.  British military/government feeding media PROPAGANDA.  Media choosing to PUBLISH government PROPAGANDA.  US naval aggression against Russia:  Baltic Sea — US naval aggression against China:  South China Sea.  Continued NATO pressure on Russia:  US missile systems moving into Eastern Europe.     [info from John Pilger interview follows]  War Hawk:  Hillary Clinton — embodiment of seamless aggressive American imperialist post-WWII system.  USA in frenzy of preparation for a conflict.  Greatest US-led build-up of forces since WWII gathered in Eastern Europe and in Baltic states.  US expansion & military preparation HAS NOT BEEN REPORTED IN THE WEST.  Since US paid for & controlled US coup, UKRAINE has become an American preserve and CIA Theme Park, on Russia's borderland, through which Germans invaded in the 1940s, costing 27 million Russian lives.  Imagine equivalent occurring on US borders in Canada or Mexico.  US military preparations against RUSSIA and against CHINA have NOT been reported by MEDIA.  US has sent guided missile ships to diputed zone in South China Sea.  DANGER OF US PRE-EMPTIVE NUCLEAR STRIKES.  China is on HIGH NUCLEAR ALERT.  US spy plane intercepted by Chinese fighter jets.  Public is primed to accept so-called 'aggressive' moves by China, when these are in fact defensive moves:  US 400 major bases encircling China; Okinawa has 32 American military installations; Japan has 130 American military bases in all.  WARNING PENTAGON MILITARY THINKING DOMINATES WASHINGTON. ⟴  
Showing posts with label PRISM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PRISM. Show all posts

April 09, 2015

SNOWDEN, ASSANGE & WIKILEAKS: USA - NSA Police-State Dictatorship & Corporate Media State-Aligned Propaganda




John Oliver’s interview with Edward Snowden: Pseudo-satire in defense of NSA surveillance 
By Thomas Gaist
9 April 2015

Comedy host John Oliver conducted an interview with National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in Moscow recently that was broadcast Sunday on his HBO showLast Week Tonight with John Oliver.” In the process, Oliver exposed his solidarity with the American state and its vast, illegal spying operations. He took the opportunity of the conversation to come out harshly against Snowden’s decision to leak large quantities of NSA documents.

Pushing for a confession that his actions were potentially “harmful,” the British-born Oliver demanded to know whether Snowden had personally read every single document contained in the files that the former NSA employee transferred to journalists beginning in the summer of 2013.

“I have evaluated all of the documents that are in the archive. I do understand what I turned over,” Snowden replied.

“There’s a difference between understanding what’s in the documents and reading what’s in the documents. Because when you’re handing over thousands of NSA documents, the last thing you’d want to do is read them,” Oliver retorted sarcastically. He went on, “You have to own that. You’re giving documents with information that could be harmful.”

Oliver repeated the favored arguments of the Obama administration and intelligence establishment to the effect that the preservation of “national security” required the elimination of civil liberties, such as Fourth Amendment protections against arbitrary searches and seizures.

“We all want perfect privacy and perfect safety, but those two things cannot coexist,” Oliver said, comparing the NSA spy programs to a “Badass pet falcon,” which he asserted could not live together with “an adorable pet vole named Herbert.”

Oliver’s attack on Snowden reached extraordinary and insulting heights. At one point, he interrupted the internationally respected whistleblower for sounding too much like “the IT guy from work… Please don’t teach me anything. I don’t want to learn. You smell like canned soup,” Oliver said to the courageous defender of democratic rights, who has now endured nearly two years of persecution and exile.

Oliver’s hostility towards Snowden and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is an expression of his staunch support, almost universally shared among well-to-do strata in American society, for the continuation of the US government’s surveillance programs.

In a couple of brief asides, Oliver half-heartedly suggested that minor reforms to the system of authoritarian shadow courts and antidemocratic laws erected to legitimize the spying might be necessary. But the development and permanent maintenance of mass surveillance programs by the US government went unquestioned.

If nothing else, the Snowden interview should help clear matters up for those who still had illusions about Oliver, Jon Stewart and their ilk. Behind their sophomoric antics, designed to dupe more naïve elements looking for something genuinely antiestablishment, lies a run-of-the-mill, conformist outlook, in keeping with the lavish material rewards they receive. (Oliver made an estimated $2,000,000 in 2013.)

In one of a few moments when he adopted a serious tone, Oliver cited the failure of the New York Times to fully redact one of the NSA slides, an oversight he claimed was a “f***-up” that exposed a US intelligence operation against al Qaeda in Mosul, Iraq.

In another, he warned viewers that WikiLeaks’ Assange was “even less careful than Snowden” about the material he was leaking. He mocked Assange, who remains trapped inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London as a result of his efforts to expose US war crimes, comparing him to “a sandwich bag full of biscuit dough wearing a Stevie Nicks wig.”

Pointing to video clips of street interviewees who showed increased concern over surveillance after Oliver referred to reports that NSA agents view nude pictures sent by targets via email and text message, the comedy host contended that Americans’ interest in the matter does not extend beyond such matters.

From here, Oliver arrived at the notion that the failure of even minimal reform of the surveillance operations to gain traction results from the fact that ordinary Americans can only be convinced to think about politics through appeals of the most backward kind. “Domestic surveillance, Americans give some of a sh** about. Foreign surveillance, American don’t give any sh** about,” Oliver said.

When Snowden noted that such abuses are “seen as no big deal in the culture of the NSA,” and that agency employees “see naked pictures all the time,” Oliver issued another absurd slander against the US population. “This is the most visible line in the sand for people. ‘Can they see my dick?’” Oliver said.

If wide sections of the population lack accurate knowledge about recent developments in government spying, it is the outcome of the systematic and deliberate efforts to conceal the truth by the corporate media to which Oliver belongs.

Snowden made patient efforts to work around Oliver’s willful ignorance and class arrogance, seeking to explain that along with the “dick pictures” obsessed over by Oliver, the NSA is collecting every other form of data on the planet, from US and non-US individuals alike, in open violation of the US Bill of Rights and international law.

“If you have your email somewhere like Gmail, hosted on a server overseas or transferred overseas or [if it] at anytime crosses outside the borders of the United States, your junk ends up in the database,” Snowden commented. “Google moves data internationally and NSA catches copies during this process, through PRISM, with Google’s involvement. All the major companies, Yahoo, Facebook, the US government deputizes them to be its surveillance sheriffs,” he added.

Oliver is not engaging in political satire, of which there is a long and proud tradition, in any meaningful sense of the word. Genuine satire attacks the powerful, exposing their lies and hypocrisy. Oliver, on the other hand, instinctively aligns himself with the US ruling elite and its historically unprecedented surveillance apparatus, one of the foundations of a police-state dictatorship. Sunday’s installment of Last Week was an exercise in pro-NSA propaganda and cultural degradation.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/04/09/oliv-a09.html

COMMENT

Great article.  Wish I could think like this guy.  All I thought was:  what an asshole Oliver is, but I'd never have been able to articulate why as well as the article author.

Article also ties in nicely with the one I looked at earlier:

      Beyond Manufacturing Consent
      By: Paul Street
Manufacturing ConsentUnited States corporate media’s role as propaganda organ for that nation’s imperial establishment
US corporate media’s biggest contribution to the engineering of mass “consent.”
     US corporate media function of transmitting
     ideology and propaganda
     in service to .. interrelated hierarchies of empire.
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Beyond-Manufacturing-Consent-20150327-0024.html
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
OTHER
Vilifying WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning by Hearsay

'Vilification by hearsay' article in relation to the recent Sean Penn criticisms of WikiLeaks and Assange.




February 26, 2015

CLOUD COMPUTING & SURVELLANCE: Caspar Bowden - European Parliament - Oct 2012 (Video)
















Caspar Bowden forsees PRISM in October 2012

Secret access by foreign govts
in context of cloud computing:
Cloud providers are transnational companies ...
[Caspar Bowden 2012]

subject to conflicts of international public law.
Biggest threat not from Patriot Act
but from a law still largely unknown.

... the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Act 2008
Cloud computing a grave threat
to sovereignty of European data

None of the regulatory proposals so far [2012]
appreciated the gravity of the situation.

Details of FISA unknown to Commission or data protection authorities until 2011.

... without any of the safeguards applicable to US citizens (in direct contradiction to what public told in EU Parliament).

FISAAA passed 2008 to legalise surveillance which US govt began circa 9/11, which became known as 'warrantless wiretapping'.

Mass surveillance of interl communications using super computers to trawl through data has been practised for a long time.

The system known as Echelon was itself investigated by the European Parliament in 2000.

Question that led to warrantless wiretapping scandal was: *had Americans had been caught up in intl surveillance systems?*

Note: 'warrantless wiretapping' (ie mass US surveillance) scandal = issue in 2012, prior to Snowden expose (May 2013)

Recommended: Find speech of William Binney, one of whilsteblowers @ NY conference in June & consider yourself implications.

William Binney: a crypto-mathematician & NSA senior official nearly 40 years
LINK:
Interview: June 14, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErRQeQd39zw

William Binney was NSA engineer who built a vast data mining system for NSA, designed for mass surveillance, foreign & intl.

European policy makers have not understood that they were intended the targets of the surveillance system that Binney built.

Under Euro Convention of Human Rights & EU fundamental rights = illegal to discriminate protection according to nationality.

Everyone in the jurisdiction of Europe has an equal right to have their privacy protected from unjustified surveillance.

FISAAA only protects US persons. Europe
= legitimate purpose of covert surveillance
is LIMITED to combating serious crime & national or economic security.

Europe: one member state cannot lawfully spy on another member's citizens merely for some foreign policy objective/advantage.

FISAAA expressly authorises surveillance of info with respect to foreign-based political organisation (or territory) ...

[FISAAA authority] ... that relates to the affairs of the United States. [Pretty much covers everywhere - blanket authority]

FISAAA vastly broader definition than anything that is lawful under ECHR, so foreigners' data in the cloud could be scanned

ie. Given broad FISAAA authority 2008, foreign data in the cloud could be scanned by USA for purely political surveillance.

Any data that was moved to cloud that was previously processed on EU org premises has been vulnerable.

A.29 working party issued opinion on cloud computing Far from waking up to risks of mass surveillance, they endorse mechanisms

A.29 endorse mech's devised decade ago eg. outsourcing direct marketing & call centres as suitable 4 cloud computing COLOSSAL RISK

A.29 warning prohibit direct disclosures by cloud providers to non-EU govts, unless this falls within established international agreements

However, A.29 believes the real risk comes from Patriot Act & case by case demands for data. No appreciation of risk ..

A.29 no appreciation of risk of continuous & systematic mass surveillance of cloud data.

Software fabric of US cloud providers is maintained from ops centres in US, so mass surveillance possible through remote control

[Cloud providers: ops centres in US] so, USG can secretly order companies to comply to demand for access to Euro cloud data.

Any data put into clouds can be accessed directly & secretly by USA, to bypass agreements covering law enforcement sector

US can bypass:
eg
PNR & Swift Agreements etc.
A.29 fully envisage & *permit* secret disclosures of data / loopholes have already been built in.

Encrypt. data to & from cloud irrelevant b/c FISAAA lets data extraction from inside data centre after data decrypted for processing

No way EU data protect. authority can know if cloud is wiretapped, if software powering cloud controlled out EU jurisdiction

Mass surveillance of cloud would be done in software using power of cloud itself to scan & filter data for further analysis

Huge new data centres belonging to NSA are being built for this purpose.

No commercial audit process can possibly uncover secret use of national security laws of another country.

Until problem is fixed by revising US legislation or treaty, only prudent policy is a) physically confining cloud facilities ...

.. under exclusive EU jurisdiction. b) using open-source software b/c backdoor insertion risk in closed-source software.

FISAAA can order backdoor insertion into closed-source software.

Closing legal loopholes for cloud surveillance is not enough, however.

Not credible that national data protection authorities can mount effective enforcement actions v. coys size of Microsoft or Google

$1-billion fine on Microsoft for competition offences took the EU nearly 10 yrs, while Microsoft derived profits in excess.

Coys can afford to lawyer up to tie cases in knots. Same thing will happen w. fines under regulations & 2% = small cost of business.

ie. 2% = small cost of doing business to access the 5-million consumers of the EU

Need: dedicated & centrally operating prosecution authority for major cases of transnational data protection enforcement.

Also need: capacity to fight long legal battles with adequate professional resources.  New Board & independence of Comm. influence.

Only in this way can enforcement become sufficiently credible to alter corporate behaviour.

Deterrent to US companies ignoring EU protection law = very substantial rewards to be offered to corporate whistleblowers

Need: corporate whitleblower rewards of sufficient size to overcome US secrecy laws & cast-iron legal protection, as well.

Such methods have been effective against tax evasion & competition cases; why not data protection?

It is not too late to wake up from the long sleepwalk towards an irreversible loss of data sovereignty.

Unless 3rd countries prepared to offer Europeans the same protections they offer own citizens, the clouds will have to part.

COMMENT

Found this very interesting and have transcribed a rough take of what was presented before the EU Parliament by Caspar Bowden, in 2012.

The current status of the proposals is unknown to me.

What was also conveyed is that:
European law prohibits state surveillance of the ordinary, lawful, democratic, political activities of individuals or groups.
Somebody ought to let the British police and authorities know about this, as they're forever conducting aggressive spying and infiltration campaigns against political activists and protesters (Oh, and mass surveillance of ordinary citizens).



September 21, 2014

Al-Manar: WikiLeaks Founder Assange: Google Working for NSA

ASSANGE

WikiLeaks Founder Assange: Google Working for NSA
Local Editor
Julian Assange WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made an alarming claim that internet search engine Google is working like an intelligence agency, collecting, storing and indexing the data of its users.

Speaking to BBC and Sky News, Assange compared Google to a “a privatized version of the NSA,” referring to the US National Security Agency which was revealed to have been spying on millions of people worldwide by whistleblower Edward Snowden last year.

“Google’s business model is the spy. It makes more than 80 percent of its money by collecting information about people, pooling it together, storing it, indexing it, building profiles of people to predict their interests and behavior, and then selling those profiles principally to advertisers, but also others,” Assange told the BBC.

“So the result is that Google, in terms of how it works, its actual practice, is almost identical to the National Security Agency or GCHQ,” he said.

Assange also went on to say that Google has been working with the NSA since 2002, and is included as part of the defense industrial base as of 2009.

“They have been engaged with the Prism system, where nearly all information collected by Google is available to the NSA,” Assange said, adding “at the institutional level, Google is deeply involved in US foreign policy.”

Assange, who has been trapped in London's Ecuadorian embassy since June 2012 after being granted asylum, risks being arrested immediately by British police who stand watch outside the embassy should he attempt to leave.


http://www.almanar.com.lb/english/adetails.php?fromval=1&cid=31&frid=31&eid=171884





For information on PRISM program, a link to the Wikipedia - here

Briefly from Wikipedia:

PRISM is a clandestine mass electronic surveillance data mining program launched in 2007 by the National Security Agency (NSA), with participation from an unknown date by the British equivalent agency, GCHQ.

... The Prism program collects stored Internet communications based on demands made to Internet companies such as Google Inc. under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.
Systems:

    PRISM
    ECHELON
    Carnivore
    DISHFIRE
    STONEGHOST
    Frenchelon

Agencies:

    ASD        (Australian Signals Directorate)

    BND       (German)

    CSIS       (Canadian) (Security Intelligence Service)

    CSEC      (Canadian) (Communications Security Establishment)

    DGSE     (French) 

(Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure/ 
General Directorate for External Security)
    GCHQ  (British)

    GCSB   (NZ) (Government Communications Security Bureau)

    NGIA   (US)  (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency)

    NSA     (US)  (National Security Agency)

    NRO    (US) National Reconnaissance Office


 

[Agencies listed are matched with subsequent look-ups.]