During a speech today on “cybersecurity,” Obama told a whopper. He said the government’s effort to protect us from cyber bad guys “will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic. We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans.”
Is it possible Obama has never heard of Mark Klein, the retired AT&T communications technician who said years ago that the company shunted all Internet traffic — including traffic from peering links connecting to other Internet backbone providers — to semantic traffic analyzers, installed in a secret room inside the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco? There are similar rooms in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego, all sucking up internet data.
Whistleblower Mark Klein
Klein explained that the multinational corporation is doing this at the behest of the NSA. It is “vacuum-cleaner surveillance” approach that grabs everything. “Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of [the Bush] administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act],” said Klein in 2006.
After the NSA showed up in 2002 at AT&T’s Folsom Street facility, Klein began connecting the dots. “You might recall there was a big blowup in the news about the Total Information Awareness [TIA] program, led by Adm. [John] Poindexter, which caused the big upsetness in Congress, because what Poindexter was proposing to do was draw in databases from everywhere — and this was in The New York Times — draw in Internet data, bank records, travel records, everything into one big conglomeration which could be searchable by the government so they could find out everything about what anybody’s doing at any time of day,” Klein told PBS.
“And all this would be done without any warrants. This is how it was presented by Poindexter himself in The New York Times, and that caused a great upset, brouhaha, in Congress.”
On January 16, 2003, Senator Russ Feingold introduced legislation to suspend the activity of the Total Information Awareness program pending a Congressional review of privacy issues involved. In February 2003, Congress passed legislation suspending activities of the IAO (Information Awareness Office) pending a Congressional report of the office’s activities.
Congress acted after William Safire published an article in the New York Times claiming “[TIA] has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans” (see You Are a Suspect, November 14, 2002).
Israeli police shut down a Palestinian theatre in East Jerusalem on Thursday, forcing foreign writers taking part in an international literature festival to move elsewhere for the second time in a week.
The police action was the latest in recent weeks against what Israel sees as attempts by the Palestinian Authority to host political activities in the city, where both sides in the conflict have staked claims to have their national capital.
Organizers and guests voiced disappointment at the treatment of what they said was a cultural, not a political, event.
“All cultural events which take place in areas of contention have political undertones,” British writer Jeremy Harding said at the theatre after police moved in. “Talking about what literature is and what it means in a fraught political situation is the most honest thing we can do. They didn’t like that.”
Police ordered the assembled authors and the audience for the closing event of the 6-day Palestine Festival of Literature to leave before a reading at the Palestinian National Theatre.
Saturday’s opening event at the theatre was also shut down.
A police notice declared a closure on the orders of Israel’s internal security minister on the grounds of a breach of interim peace accords from the 1990s. These laid the framework for talks on establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but left
the status of Jerusalem to be determined by further negotiation.
Israel says the entire city is and always will be its capital, a point stressed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week on the 42nd anniversary of Israel’s capture of Arab East Jerusalem.
For their part, Palestinians want their capital to be in the city.
Since a February election that brought the right-wing Likud leader to power, Israeli authorities have also banned events marking Jerusalem becoming the Arab League’s Capital of Arab Culture for 2009 and closed down a media centre set up in East Jerusalem for this month’s visit to the city by Pope Benedict.
Palestinians, who make up about a third of the population of Israel’s municipality of Jerusalem, complain of a campaign to drive them out.
Israeli officials deny any discrimination in policies that range from the demolition of homes built without permits to the provision of municipal services in Arab areas.
Amal Nashashibi, attending the literature festival, said: “Because of the drive to make the city purely Jewish, they’re trying to black out anything that is related to Arab culture.”
Dozens of people moved quietly from the theatre to the nearby British Council, one of the sponsors of the festival.
In its second edition, it lists among its patrons the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and British playwright Harold Pinter. Both Pinter, who was Jewish, and Darwish were known as critics of Israeli policy. Both died in the past year.
Pastor David Jones and his wife Mary have been told that they cannot invite friends to their San Diego, Calif. home for a Bible study — unless they are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to San Diego County.
“On Good Friday we had an employee from San Diego County come to our house, and inform us that the Bible study that we were having was a religious assembly, and in violation of the code in the county.” David Jones told FOX News.
“We told them this is not really a religious assembly — this is just a Bible study with friends. We have a meal, we pray, that was all,” Jones said.
A few days later, the couple received a written warning that cited “unlawful use of land,” ordering them to either “stop religious assembly or apply for a major use permit,” the couple’s attorney Dean Broyles told San Diego news station 10News.
But the major use permit could cost the Jones’ thousands of dollars just to have a few friends over.
For David and Mary Jones, it’s about more than a question of money.
“The government may not prohibit the free exercise of religion,” Broyles told FOX News. “I believe that our Founding Fathers would roll over in their grave if they saw that here in the year 2009, a pastor and his wife are being told that they cannot hold a simple Bible study in their own home.”
“The implications are great because it’s not only us that’s involved,” Mary Jones said. “There are thousands and thousands of Bible studies that are held all across the country. What we’re interested in is setting a precedent here — before it goes any further — and that we have it settled for the future.”
The couple is planning to dispute the county’s order this week.
If San Diego County refuses to allow the pastor and his wife to continue gathering without acquiring a permit, they will consider a lawsuit in federal court.
At least eight Russians are reported to have been released in Egypt after being arrested several days ago. More than 20 more are still being held in Cairo. The Russian Consulate says Moscow wants more explanations.
Five out of eight detained students from Kazakhstan have also been released, the country’s Foreign Ministry reported on Saturday evening.
Over 35 Russian citizens, mostly students studying in Al-Azhar University, have been detained by Egyptian authorities for no apparent reason on Friday.
The Russian Consulate in Egypt has confirmed the arrests, stressing they were conducted during the night and in a rude manner. A spokesman for the Russian embassy in Cairo Timur Agametov told Russian Interfax news agency on Friday that the list of detainees is growing.
The Russian student association says the arrests started on May 27 in Cairo when task force officers stormed into leased apartments. Most of the detained students come from Russia’s North Caucasus republics.
It is reported that police were rummaging apartments and confiscating personal belongings, including laptops and money.
Alex Jones’ latest DVD documentary release, Reflections And Warnings – An Interview With Aaron Russo, pays homage to maverick patriot Aaron Russo, who left this mortal coil in August 2007 after a long battle with cancer. The film is a 90 minute full version of Jones’ seminal interview with Russo, which took place months before his death.
This was Russo’s final videotaped interview before he passed away, but his legacy as the founder of the movement to end the power monopoly of the Federal Reserve makes the documentary more contemporary than ever before in light of how the Federal Reserve has increased its stranglehold over the American economy since the beginning of the financial crisis last year.
The DVD is interspersed with new footage of Jones highlighting the progression of many things that Russo warned were part of the ultimate agenda for the prison planet before he passed away.
Russo was perhaps best known for managing star of stage and screen Bette Midler, as well as producing Trading Places starring Eddie Murphy, but his last great work was undoubtedly the most important of his life – Russo’s groundbreaking exposé of the criminal run-for-profit Federal Reserve system, the documentary America: From Freedom to Fascism.
The interview opens with Russo talking about how he first started to become aware of the fact that something was very wrong in America, when cops set him up and raided his Chicago night club and later demanded protection money, mafia style.
The conversation on the DVD features many shocking revelations that were divulged by Russo’s one-time close friend Nick Rockefeller about the elite’s agenda for mankind.
After his popular video Mad As Hell was released and he began his campaign to become Governor of Nevada, Russo was noticed by Rockefeller and introduced to him by a female attorney. Seeing Russo’s passion and ability to affect change, Rockefeller set about on a subtle mission to recruit Russo into the elite.
During one conversation, Rockefeller asked Russo if he was interested in joining the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) but Russo rejected the invitation, saying he had no interest in “enslaving the people” to which Rockefeller coldly questioned why he cared about the “serfs.”
“I used to say to him what’s the point of all this,” said Russo, “you have all the money in the world you need, you have all the power you need, what’s the point, what’s the end goal?” to which Rockefeller replied (paraphrasing), “The end goal is to get everybody chipped, to control the whole society, to have the bankers and the elite people control the world.”
Rockefeller even assured Russo that if he joined the elite his chip would be specially marked so as to avoid undue inspection by the authorities.
In another conversation, Russo states that Rockefeller told him, “Eleven months before 9/11 happened there was going to be an event and out of that event we were going to invade Afghanistan to run pipelines through the Caspian sea, we were going to invade Iraq to take over the oil fields and establish a base in the Middle East, and we’d go after Chavez in Venezuela.”
Rockefeller also told Russo that he would see soldiers looking in caves in Afghanistan and Pakistan for Osama bin Laden and that there would be an “Endless war on terror where there’s no real enemy and the whole thing is a giant hoax,” so that “the government could take over the American people,” according to Russo, who said that Rockefeller was cynically laughing and joking as he made the astounding prediction.
“Eleven months to a year later that’s what happened….he certainly knew that something was going to happen,” said Russo.
In a later conversation, Rockefeller asked Russo what he thought women’s liberation was about. Russo’s response that he thought it was about the right to work and receive equal pay as men, just as they had won the right to vote, caused Rockefeller to laughingly retort, “You’re an idiot! Let me tell you what that was about, we the Rockefeller’s funded that, we funded women’s lib, we’re the one’s who got all of the newspapers and television – the Rockefeller Foundation.”
Rockefeller told Russo of two primary reasons why the elite bankrolled women’s lib, one because before women’s lib the bankers couldn’t tax half the population and two because it allowed them to get children in school at an earlier age, enabling them to be indoctrinated into accepting the state as the primary family, breaking up the traditional family model.
This revelation dovetails previous admissions on behalf of feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem (pictured) that the CIA bankrolled Ms. Magazine as part of the same agenda of breaking up traditional family models.
Rockefeller was often keen to stress his idea that “the people have to be ruled” by an elite and that one of the tools of such power was population reduction, that there were “too many people in the world,” and world population numbers should be reduced by at least half.
Russo talks at length in the interview about how any attempt at taking America back from the criminal elite needs to be focused around dismantling the private criminal enterprise known as the Federal Reserve, by returning America to a system where the government prints its own money backed by gold without having to be in debt and pay interest to a private cabal of elitists.
At the end of the interview, Russo describes how he had plans to further fight the new world order once he overcame his cancer, which unfortunately was not to be. However, Aaron’s legacy will live on through this interview, through his outstanding documentary America: From Freedom To Fascism and through the countless people in his life who he brought joy to by way of his engaging, warm and above all, innately human personality.
Our first stop on the Southern California Truth Tour at the beautiful Clovis Veterans Memorial Building was quite successful. Before our multimedia presentation on the destruction of the three WTC high-rises on 9/11 we asked for a show of hands of the 101 people in attendance. Eighteen believed in the official story of fire induced collapses at the Twin Towers before the presentation and twenty-seven were unsure. The remainder believed in Explosive Controlled Demolition. After the presentation zero believed the official story and only two were unsure !
This is one of the ways we measure success at AE911Truth. We also encourage our attendees to do follow up research and local activism. We tripled the size of the local hardworking dedicated 9/11 Fresno Truth group led by Dennis, Trevor, Jordan, Steve, Manuel, and others here in Fresno !
But the best is that we got some TV coverage by local Fox affiliate KMPH ! We were on two separate shows. For the 10pm News they filmed part of the presentation and an interview – but failed to show any of the evidence that we presented with each (see below). And they brought in their local firefighter hero to cast aspersions upon us. And for the morning show “Great Day” they did an in-studio live interview of us which lasted seven minutes – where I was able to get a lot of evidence out there – including Building 7 on video ! Check it out (see above) !
TEHRAN (AFP) – Iranian officials accused the United States on Friday of “hiring” those behind a suicide bombing of a Shiite mosque that killed 25 people, linking the attack to next month’s presidential election.
“Three people involved with the terrorist incident were arrested,” said Jalal Sayah, deputy governor of Sistan-Baluchestan, the province bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan where the attack took place.
“According to the information obtained they were hired by America and the agents of the arrogance,” Sayah told the Fars news agency. Officials usually use the term “global arrogance” to refer to Iran arch-foe the United States.
Interior Minister Sadegh Mahsooli also pointed the finger towards the United States and Israel.
“Enemies try to influence the election by terror just as they did in Zahedan yesterday,” the Mehr news agency quoted him as saying.
“The terror agents are neither Sunni nor Shiite but American and Israeli seeking a Sunni-Shiite divide.”
The attack during evening prayers at the Amir al-Momenin mosque in Zahedan, the restive capital of Sistan-Baluchestan, wounded 125 others.
On Thursday, Iran was in mourning to commemorate the death of Fatima Zahra, the daughter of the Prophet Mohammed.
Local Martyrs’ Foundation released a list of 24 male victims who had been identified of the 25 killed, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Twenty-three were Iranians and one was an Afghan. One other victim had still not been identified.
“This catastrophe was a suicide terrorist attack,” Zahedan MP Payman Foroozesh told ILNA news agency.
Provincial justice chief Ebrahim Hamidi said the attacker “had stood in the last line of male worshippers during the evening prayer, carried out the bombing and died.”
Hamidi told ISNA news agency that one person had been arrested for the bombing and “charged with armed opposition and acting against national security. But his motive cannot be presented for the moment.”
He said most attacks in the restive province were carried out by a Sunni rebel group headed by ring leader Abdolmalek Rigi, but he could not confirm whether the group could be blamed for Thursday’s bombing.
In recent years, Sistan-Baluchestan has been the scene of a deadly insurgency by Sunni rebels of the Jundullah (Soldiers of God) group, headed by Rigi, which is strongly opposed to the government of predominantly Shiite Iran.
The province also lies on a major narcotics-smuggling route from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In an angry tirade Tehran Friday prayer speaker Ahmad Khatami repeated anti-US accusations and alleged the bombers were followers of Wahabism — the ultra-conservative version of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia — many of whose followers deride Shiites as rejectionists.
“One can undoubtedly trace the finger prints of America and Israel in this incident. Although the operators were Wahabis and non-believing evil Salafis, the direction comes from elsewhere,” the hardline cleric said.
Iran’s former premier and presidential hopeful Mir Hossein Mousavi too blamed “foreign forces” for Thursday’s attack.
The US Department of Homeland Security is set to kickstart a controversial new pilot to scan the fingerprints of travellers departing the United States.
From June, US Customs and Border Patrol will take a fingerprint scan of international travellers exiting the United States from Detroit, while the US Transport Security Administration will take fingerprint scans of international travellers exiting the United States from Atlanta.
Biometric technology such as fingerprint scans has been used by US Customs and Border Patrol for several years to gain a biometric record of non-US citizens entering the United States.
But under the Bush Administration, a plan was formulated to also scan outgoing passengers.
Michael Hardin, a senior policy analyst with the US-Visit Program at the United States Department of Homeland Security told a Biometrics Institute conference today that the DHS will use the data from the trial to “inform us as to where to take [exit screening] next.”
“We are trying to ensure we know more about who came and who left,” he said. “We have a large population of illegal immigrants in the United States – we want to make sure the person getting on the plane really is the person the records show to be leaving.”
The original exit scanning legislation planned by the Bush administration stipulated that airlines would be responsible for conducting the exit fingerprints.
But after much protest, Hardin said the new Obama administration re-considered this legislation two weeks ago and is “not as sold that private sector should be agency for exit fingerprints.”
“The new administration feels that perhaps it is more appropriate that Government should take that role.”
Mulling mobile biometrics
The exit fingerprint scanning is one of several fronts in which the DHS is using biometric technology to secure its borders.
Every day, the US-VISIT scheme uses fingerprint scans to enrol or verify the identity of 86,400 visitors to the United States.
These scans are conducted on a purpose-built, cube-shaped fingerprint scanner.
“We specified to vendors, it had to be no more than 6 x 6 x 6 inches – it had to fit on counter and light enough to walk around with,” Hardin said. “We also told them the reader light had to be green – people tend to think red is hot to touch.”
The DHS is testing whether it can adapt the same biometric technology to enrol or veify identities from remote locations using wireless connectivity.
Hardin said the DHS is seeking an identity verification system for the US Coast Guard, which tends to operate in a difficult environmental conditions.
“We’ll do this the way we did the Cube at customs – we will go to the industry with some specifications and say, if you build it we’ll buy it.”
RF identity cards trial on track
The DHS is also set to go-live with a trial of RF-enabled biometric identity cards on June 1, aimed at securing the border between the United States and Canada.
U.S. and Canadian citizens will be authenticated to travel between the two countries using identity cards fitted with radio-frequency embedded chips.
Hardin said Americans and Canadians have traditionally been able to travel between the two nations with little fuss.
But since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the DHS has insisted on the use of a passport, passport card, drivers license or some other form of documentation approved by U.S. States or Canadian provinces to verify identity.
As of June 1, travellers crossing the border will be asked to carry an RF-enabled card which transmits a passport photo image and information about the traveller to border control staff systems, who can then check that photograph against the physical appearance of the traveller or their vehicle.
The commander of Fort Campbell army base in Kentucky has ordered a three-day suspension of regular duties to focus on a spike in suicides among his troops amid concern over a wider trend across the armed services.
The “stand-down” on Friday entered its third day at Fort Campbell, which is home to the famed 101st Airborne Division and has recorded the highest rate of suicide in the army, with at least 11 confirmed or suspected suicides.
Brigadier General Stephen Townsend announced the stand-down to focus attention on the problem after two more soldiers took their lives last week.
“It’s bad for soldiers, it’s bad for families, bad for your units, bad for this division and our army and our country and it’s got to stop now. Suicides on Fort Campbell have to stop now,” he told troops.
“Suicide is a permanent solution to what is only a temporary problem,” Townsend said.
“No matter how bad your problem seems today, trust me, it’s not the end of the world. It will be better tomorrow. Don’t take away your tomorrow.”
The trauma of combat combined with the effect of repeated tours has led to a record rise in suicides across the armed services and particularly the US Army — which has carried the heaviest burden in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last year 128 soldiers took their lives, up from 115 in 2007, as tours of duty since 2001 have come ever more frequently and last longer.
With 64 confirmed or suspected suicides so far this year, the army looks likely to surpass last year’s record numbers.
The 20.2 per 100,000 suicide rate among US soldiers is above the national record of 19.5 per 100,000 in 2005 in the United States.
Earlier this month a US soldier, Sergeant John Russell, allegedly sprayed his comrades with lethal gunfire at a mental health clinic at a US base in Baghdad, and he has been charged with five counts of murder.
The case has underlined concerns about the psychological well-being of those serving in the military.
Due to worries over the state of Russell’s mental health, his commanding officer about a week earlier had ordered that the soldier’s weapon be confiscated and that he should go for counselling, officials said.
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said he believes the suicides are tied to the repeated deployments that have put a strain on soldiers and their families.
In his visits to US military posts, Mullen regularly appeals to troops to look out for comrades that seem troubled and has acknowledged soldiers are reluctant to seek counselling because they worry it might hold back their career.
In a 2008 poll by the American Psychological Association (APA), 61 percent of servicemen and women said that asking for help to treat psychological problems would have a negative impact on their career, and 53 percent said it would decrease their status among their peers.
“Our stress levels are up, and we have to realize that stress is driving a lot of this, and we?ve got to look at ways to relieve that stress,” Mullen said last month during a visit to a Texas military base.
“The first big step in taking care of our problem is acknowledging that you have one — and we do,” Mullen said. “Suicide is never easy, (and) solving it won?t be easy. But everyone in leadership is focused on it.”
In March, military leaders ordered a stand-down at every US Army installation to focus on preventing suicides.
The Fort Campbell event was designed to free up soldiers and their officers from daily routines to ensure the problem received their undivided attention, spokeswoman Kelly Tyler said.
The stand-down was meant to remind soldiers “that they have an accountability to themselves and to their peers” and “to remind leaders they are also accountable for the well-being of their soldiers,” she told AFP.
Relations between France and Djibouti were strained over the Borrel affair
A French court has overturned jail sentences handed out in absentia to two Djibouti officials convicted of halting a probe into a French judge’s death.
The court also ordered the cancellation of international arrest warrants for public prosecutor Djama Souleiman and the secret service chief, Hassan Said.
Judge Bernard Borrel’s corpse was found in 1995 in Djibouti and local officials initially said he had killed himself.
But his widow said he was murdered on the orders of high-ranking officials.
At the time of his death, Borrel was acting as a consultant to the Djibouti justice ministry and reportedly investigating arms smuggling.
Mr Souleiman and Mr Said were both accused of having put pressure on key witnesses in the Borrel case with the aim of discrediting testimony that potentially linked Djibouti’s President, Ismael Omar Guelleh, to the death. He has denied any involvement.
Mohamed Saleh Alhoumekani, a former member of the Djiboutian presidential guard, told a French court last year that he had heard five men discuss the elimination of the “nosy judge” with Mr Guelleh, who was head of the former president’s private office at the time.
