Who’s Winning the War On You?

via: TheIntelHub
By Zen Gardner
July 26, 2012

We’re at war, and the enemy is us – a conscious, responsive humanity. World dominion cannot succeed with an awake, empowered population. We’re at a crucial time in history and right now the air is crackling with programmed anticipation, and that’s just how they planned it.

It’s all about our minds and hearts. The propaganda and staged events are triggers to shut you down.

We need to see through all this fabricated bullshit.

Showtime – The Bigger the Lie the Better

We’re witnessing the most massive peacetime militarization ever undertaken. Using false flags, false alerts and false enemies, the United States and England are leading the charge into a technological police state that far surpasses Orwell’s nightmare or Huxley’s drugged Brave New World.

Not only is the over-the-top London Olympics psychically begging for an incident while Israel spews their shrill “Iran’s gonna do it” campaign, but the US is wildly cranking up for a vicious war on its own people based on a completely fabricated series of false alerts and accusations used to justify their metastacizing Fascist “homeland security” gridlock.

Now fully augmented by the military a la the Olympics idiocy.   Get their drift?

All they need now is the right “justification” to make it permanent.

They’ve painted humanity into a psychological corner. 9/11 on steroids coming up. Prepare accordingly.

Continue Reading At: TheIntelHub.com

TSA Searches Unconstitutional? Is Microsoft Part Of Big Brother Network?

via: RT
July 25, 2012

In the light of the latest cases on whistleblowers it looks like privacy in the US is more and more becoming a thing of the past. The TSA has come under fire lately for hands-on searches that some say just go too far. And moreover – TSA now says they have a right to search your smart phones. This is all coming after a man by name John Corbett filed a lawsuit against the TSA. He says they detained him for refusing to be groped and then rummaged though his belongings and read through his personal items.

London’s Militarised Olympic Games Conjures Up Orwell’s 1984

via: GlobalResearch.ca
by: Finian Cunningham
July 15, 2012

The London Olympics are fast taking on the appearance and tone of a full-scale land, sea and air military operation rather than an international sporting event.

With surface-to-air missiles stationed on top of residential apartment blocks, Royal Navy battleships on alert and Royal Air Force fighter jets and helicopters patrolling the skies over Britain’s capital there is a foreboding sense of a nation at war instead of an occasion of internationalist fraternity that the ancient Games are supposed to embody.

The Games begin in just under two weeks. The latest development is the announcement by Britain’s Ministry of Defence that 3,500 extra troops are to be deployed to ensure security at the 30 venues hosting sporting events. This is in addition to the 13,500 military personnel already assigned to protect members of the public and sports teams from the risk of terrorist attack.

British General Sir Nick Parker, overseeing the security arrangements, has said that one of the contingencies being planned for is dealing with a “9/11 type event”.

The total troop deployment in and around London represents 7,000 more personnel than is currently on British operations in Afghanistan.

This figure is in addition to the 10,000 extra police officers and a division of 10,000 private security guards. It was the disclosure that G45, the private security firm with the Olympics contract, could not fulfill its manpower requirements to cover the Games that prompted the latest enlisting of additional soldiers.

Continue Reading At: GlobalResearch.com

In David Cameron’s Orwellian Britain They Now Snoop on Seaside Postcards

via: TheIntelHub.com
by: Richard Cottrell
July 5, 2012

A country crosses the Rubicon to a full blown totalitarian state when its agents decide to read the contents of seaside post cards.

In the future anyone sending the traditional vacation greeting ‘wish you were here’ to family and friends through the UK’s Royal Mail will do so in the knowledge that faceless clerks working for the intelligence services will try to decipher exactly what ‘having a lovely time’ really means.

A lovely time making bombs perhaps? Is ‘the sea is a bit cold for the time of the year’ some kind of code to transmit concealed instructions to a cell of fiendish plotters?

God forbid that anyone should send love and kisses from anywhere east of Sussex and sign off ‘Mohammed.’  That will be quite sufficient to earn a 4 a.m. wake up call from Scotland Yard’s finest.

Nor is it just about plain old postcards by any means. A new bill crawling through parliament conveys the power to read inscriptions written on the outside of envelopes.

There used to be a very famous message popular with service personnel posted around the empire, who were inclined to inscribe BURMA on the back of coming home letters addressed to wives and girl friends. Decoded, it read: Be Undressed and Ready My Angel.

Lord knows what the censors might make of that in these days of synthetic paranoia manufactured by the denizens of law and order and the security-obsessed guards of the state.

Of course the whole thing is perfect nonsense. Who sends postcards in the age of the Internet, the iPhone, Blackberries and so forth? Intimacies are more likely exchanged electronically these days.

Unfortunately the snoops are listening in there too, so whichever means you employ to communicate, old fashioned steam mail or otherwise, all-knowing, all-seeing Big Brother is on your back.

In David Cameron’s Britain you are doomed to be cornered any route you take.

The extension of the security dragnet to picture postcards and the scrutinizing of scribbles on envelopes in search of some secret hint to blow things up, depicts a state which has broken loose on its hinges.

It has become the true Orwellian condition in which every citizen is a suspect, unless you happen to be a fully paid member of the one percent, a policeman, or a member of the Teflon secret services, HMG.

Let’s not forget, demands for Google user information increasing by a whopping by 25% last year. There is not the faintest reason to maintain this constant state of scrutiny over the private citizen, except to turn every individual into an object of perpetual suspicion.

The word ‘object’ – inferring a human being – conveys considerable weight there.

David Cameron’s administration treats the entire nation as though it were composed of idiots.

So the new powers forced on the Royal Mail will not actually be deployed, just ‘held in reserve’, the response to which is: why the hell bother anyway?

Of course mass sedatives supplied in the form of the recent jubilee jamboree go a long way to distracting the populace from the ever-tightening, strangling grip of the emerging British national security state.

In another garbled version of this story, which spineless parliamentarians swallowed unchallenged, the truly Orwellian sounding ‘Ministry of Justice’ instead of the Post Office already had the powers to read private mail, so the objective was simply to ‘extend’ existing powers.

Did anyone in the UK know that? Were they aware that any mail could be inspected so that all the detritus of private lives could be inspected at will?

I must say that my quarrel is less with sleepwalking Members of Parliament – or even an absent minded prime minister who recently forgot his young daughter after a restoring break from the pressures of high office at a country – than the docile masses who so willingly beckon their own enslavement.

As it is a government that came to power pledged to roll back ever expanding surveillance and intrusion has instead switched the destruction of civil liberties to overdrive.

Airports are madhouses, doctors carrying vital organ transplants are tossed off planes because the containers are the wrong shape or size, tourists are picked up for snapping popular attractions, nosey individuals are encouraged (and even paid) to snoop on their neighbors, spy cameras are fixed to rubbish bins and other street paraphernalia to maintain around the clock surveillance of every citizen, regardless of age.

British policemen on the beat look like Robocops. You wouldn’t dare ask one of these snarling armor-plated Bobbies for destructions, lest he should think you were on a mission to explode some infernal suicide device.

Yet there is a bitterly ironic aspect to the gloomy scenario, namely that the British government – and David Cameron personally – is ensnared in the massive rogue phone hacking scandal connected with the activities of the ravenous Murdoch empire in the United Kingdom.

I intend to return to this theme at a later date, but for the moment these are the quite astonishing edited highlights.

It transpires that for years a raunchy red top Sunday tabloid called the News of the World, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s flagship News International, indulged in serial ‘e-fracking’ of voice mails made by scores of politicians and public celebrities.

These quite shamelessly illegal indulgences extended to the veterans of Britain’s useless foreign wars, survivors of the July 2005 bombing of the London Transport network – and in one especially morbid episode, tapping the mobile phone of a murdered schoolgirl to discover if by some miracle she might still be alive.

Of course all this serial e-fracking was conducted in pursuit of sensational and salacious stories to boost circulation and advertising revenues of the newspaper known to generations of Britons as the Screws of the World.

What did the custodians of law and order do when confronted with the incontrovertible facts? Practically nothing.

Scotland Yard officers turned out to be culprits feeding juice tidbits to newspaper reporters including the News of the World hackers.

Bad enough, but even worse, the Yard did all it could to smother Murdochgate in its infancy, quite obviously responding to orders from a higher level. This of course was not remotely connected with the highly controversial bid by News International for those remaining shares of the highly lucrative BSkyB satellite broadcasting channel which they did not already own.

In a perfectly delicious turning of the tables, senior figures in Cameron’s government – and Cameron personally – were recorded in e-mail exchanges expressing warm sentiments to Murdoch executives, even as the row over the hacking scandal touched fever pitch.

All of this is part and parcel of the sick incestuous merry-go-round pursued by British political leaders, irrespective of theoretical ideological bent, to win the priceless electoral endorsement of Murdoch’s media empire.

The story stretches back to Margaret Thatcher who regarded ‘Dear Rupert’ as an ex-officio member of her cabinet.

Blair was even more obsequious, forever jetting around News International’s Nuremburg rallies of craven executives, preaching from tablets approved by the Dear Publisher in Chief.

We are introduced to Cameron’s rather glaring deficiencies of critical judgment, even one might say, his disregard of his fiduciary responsibilities as prime minister.

Not the least of these was his decision to hire (against sound industry advice) a former News of the World editor who was demonstrably on the bridge during the hacking affair, first as the Tory Party’s lavishly rewarded Director of Communications and subsequently his own personal media controller in Downing Street.

Cameron’s follies in the Murdochgate business are seemingly endless as he blunders from one indefensible stand to the next. A Liberal coalition minister responsible for policing monopolies was taken off the BSkyB case because he had the temerity to stand by the ethical standards approved by the very parliament of which the prime minister is a member.

The minister’s replacement, one of Cameron’s Old Etonian chums, promptly and predictably went native.

The PM is now embroiled in a blazing public row with the high court judge that he personally selected to inquire into media ethics in the wake of Murdochgate. The problem is that the official inquiry under way did not puff up the usual smokescreens, but instead went for the jugular of abysmal disregard for even basic ethics and standards which has corroded the UK media, including the BBC.

Even though the Sky bid is history, along with the now shuttered News of the World, Cameron clings to Murdoch like a survivor of the Titanic rowing towards the stricken ship. Thus, Cameron accuses Lord Leveson of using his intrusive and objectionable inquiry to gag the media and stifle the free press.

This is such a reckless and stupid charge in the wake of the phone tapping scandal, one can only be amazed at the prime minister’s bizarre sense of logic, and for that matter, those who surround him who are supposedly there to tender informed advice.

Wherever one looks, one sees the prime minister’s footprints. It does not help at all that two intimates of his super-rich set roosting in his plush Oxfordshire constituency have been charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice in the hacking affair.

The fragrant flame-haired Rebekah Brooks, News International Chief Executive and another former editor of the Screws of the World, is in the dock alongside her husband Charlie, a well known figure on the British racing turf.

The case comes up for trial in the autumn, which rather guarantees that Cameron will find himself uncomfortably exposed as the Tory faithful gather for their annual gathering. The omens are not good.

Aside from Murdochgate, the recent local election results were deplorable for the Tories, there is open squabbling among the coalition crew and much touting of Borison Johnson the rowdy populist Mayor of London as leader in waiting.

For certain Murdochgate means dark skies over the annual Tory get-together.

The last occasion such a stench arose from the bowels of the Tory party was in the 1960s during the notorious Profumo affair which featured furious sexual romping connecting the defense minister, an alleged Russian spy and a gaggle of young hookers who became household names.

The setting was a palatial mansion on the banks of the River Thames. By all accounts the upper crust – including a spattering of royals – was out in force for the regular frolics organized by a society osteopath who subsequently died in police custody.

The Tory government was holed below the waterline. The PM, Old Etonian, ex-Guardsman Harold Macmillan was judged as not fully in charge of the ship or the crew and unceremoniously pushed out of office. The socialists, long believed to be dormant if not politically dead, broke 13 years of Tory rule shortly afterwards.

Macmillan was the last Old Etonian to roost in Downing Street. Well, until now that is. In the circumstances Mr. Cameron would do well to remember the age old dictum that déjà vu is invariably the ruling theme of all political cultures.

In any event as MPs prepare to set off for their long holiday recess, their seaside postcards should make for interesting reading in certain quarters.

Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative). His new book Gladio: NATO’s Dagger At The Heart Of Europe is now available from Progressive Press. You may order it using the link below (or by clicking here – Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis):

Note: if you use these links your purchase will also help support End the Lie by giving us a small commission while also supporting the great work that Richard Cottrell is doing. We would sincerely appreciate if you could shop through us.

Edited by Madison Ruppert

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This article originally appeared on End the Lie

Source: TheIntelHub.com

70 Reasons To Mourn For America’s Decline

via: ActivistPost
by: Michael Snyder
July 4, 2012

Every single year, Americans take the day off on July 4th and they celebrate everything that is good about America. We tend to be very proud of our achievements and we generally are not shy about talking about them. For example, today CNN is running a piece entitled “100 great things about America“.

And you know what? There are a lot of great things about this country. I am not afraid to say that I love America. In many ways it has been a great light for the rest of the world since it was founded.

However, things have changed. The United States has greatly fallen from where it once was. The truth is that America is rotting and decaying in thousands of different ways. We need to repent and go back to doing the things that once made this country great. The road that we are currently on is a path that leads to national suicide.

So, to be honest, now is not really the time for happy celebrations. Rather, now is the time for weeping, mourning and deep reflection. We need to turn from our profligate ways and we need to return to the fundamental principles that the early Americans understood so well. As a nation we need to look into the mirror and understand just how bad our decline has been. We are a complete and total mess, and it is time to admit that.

The following are 70 reasons to mourn for America….

1. Most Americans know much more about Kim Kardashian than they do about the Federal Reserve.

2. The way that the TSA abuses travelers is a national embarrassment. One TSA agent recently sifted her finger through the ashes of someone’s dead grandfather and then spilled his ashes all over the airport floor.

3. Many young people in America are willing to wait in line to pay a 400% markup on new Kanye West sneakers, but most of those same young people cannot even tell you how many members of Congress there are.

4. Many Americans seem to be far more interested in American Idol and Dancing With The Stars than they are in dealing with the very serious economic, political and moral problems facing this nation.

5. A recent survey found that 61 percent of all Americans believe that “paying your fair share of taxes” is being patriotic.

6. We currently have the worst president in U.S. history, and there is a chance that we may have to endure another 4 years of his insanity.

7. We have a Supreme Court that appears to have very little respect for the U.S. Constitution.

8. The financial center of our country, Wall Street, is full of psychopaths.

9. America has the highest incarceration rate and the largest total prison population in the entire world by a very wide margin.

10. The highways of America are rapidly being turned into a high tech prison grid.

11. American children today are very spoiled, very undisciplined and most of them wouldn’t know a day of hard work if it came up and bit them on the behind.

12. Today, approximately 25 million American adults are still living with their parents.

13. Back in 1962, only 13 percent of all Americans were obese. Today, approximately 36 percent of all Americans are obese.

14. Of all the major industrialized nations, America is the most obese. Mexico is in second place.

15. According to one recent survey, only 25 percent of all Americans have 6 months of emergency savings stored up.

16. The United States leads the world in credit card fraud.

17. You know that things are bad in America when even the U.S. Secret Service has developed “an Animal House reputation” for partying wildly while guarding Barack Obama during his vacations on Martha’s Vineyard.

18. In many areas of the country crime is getting worse and thieves are stealing just about anythingthat is not bolted down.

19. One recent poll found that only 70 percent of Americans agree with the Declaration of Independence.

20. The average American watches 28 hours of television every week.

21. There are more school shootings in America than anywhere else in the world.

22. Authorities are warning that ATM thefts are on the rise again.

23. Incredibly, 85 percent of the stuff sold at the biggest retailer in the United States is made outside of the country.

24. The average American drinks more than 600 sodas every single year. That is by far the most in the world.

25. The United States has the most lawyers per capita in the entire world.

26. Approximately 50 million babies have been slaughtered in hospitals and abortion clinics in America since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.

27. The media is now trying to convince us that killing off our elderly grandparentswhen they get sick is the “right thing” to do.

28. According to one survey, 50 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 cannot find the state of New York on a blank map.

29. Americans take more prescription drugs than anyone else on the planet.

30. The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world.

31. The United States has the highest rate of illegal drug use in the entire world.

32. Faith in almost every major American institution is near an all-time low.

33. The U.S. healthcare system is a complete and total mess, and now Obamacare is going to make things much, much worse.

34. Our food is rapidly being transformed into absolute garbage. As I wrote about the other day, at this point more than 70 percent of all processed foods sold in the U.S. contain at least one ingredient that has been genetically modified.

35. More people have been diagnosed with mental disorders in America than anywhere else on earth.

36. Our federal government refuses to secure our borders and has decided that most illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay inside the country.

37. Our public schools have become horribly repressive indoctrination centers.

38. The United States produces more pornography by far than any other nation in the world does.

39. According to the Pew Research Center, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married. Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.

40. The United States has the highest divorce rate in the world by a very wide margin.

41. American families are rapidly getting poorer. According to the Federal Reserve, the median net worth of families in the United States declined “from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010“.

42. According to one study, one out of every four teen girls in the United States has at least one sexually transmitted disease.

43. The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate on the entire globe.

44. The United States leads the world in eating disorder deaths.

45. Nobody has more airport security thugs groping women and children than America does.

46. Many Republicans still believe that George W. Bush was a “conservative” and that he was a “good president”.

47. The Obama administration is considering plans to unilaterally slash the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal by up to 80 percent.

48. The United States has the most complicated tax system on the entire planet.

49. All over the United States, chaplains are being banned from praying in the name of Jesus.

50. The United States exports more arms to other countries than anyone else in the world.

51. The United States has the highest child abuse death rate on the entire globe.

52. Every single year, the United States has the largest trade deficit in the world by far.

53. The United States was once ranked #1 in the world in GDP per capita. Today wehave slipped to #12.

54. One of the most popular movies in America right now is about men dancing around and taking their clothes off.

55. Americans spend more time sitting in traffic than anyone else in the world.

56. According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined.

57. The percentage of Americans that consider the Bible to be important continues to fall.

58. Some schools in America have decided to start using RFID tracking chips to monitor the movement of their students.

59. Society is starting to collapse all around us and it seems like the number of psychos in America is multiplying.

60. The poverty rate for children living in the United States is now 22 percent.

61. Nobody in the world gets more plastic surgery done than Americans do.

62. Many young people in America today are not afraid to viciously verbally abuse those that are elderly.

63. Today, 53.6 percent of all children in the city Detroit are living in poverty and 47 percent of all people living in the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.

64. The U.S. government wastes more money than any other government on earth does by far.

65. All over America, people are being attacked by mobs simply because of the color of their skin.

66. Today, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.

67. America has pushed God out of every corner of public life and now we are really starting to really feel the consequences of that.

68. In Colorado, many people returned home after the recent wildfires only to find that their homes had been looted.

69. There is more hate and division in America today than at any other time in recent memory.

70. The U.S. national debt is rapidly approaching 16 trillion dollars and the total amount of debt in the country is rapidly approaching 55 trillion dollars.

So what do you think about the current state of America?

Source: ActivistPost.com 

Your Privacy Is Yours

via: SGTReport
Source: Whiskey and Gunpowder
by: Wendy McElroy
June 27, 2012

“I Lived. I Died. Now Mind Your Own Business.” That’s how I want my tombstone to read.

What do I have to hide? Everything! Which is to say, every piece of personal information someone or something demands to know is something I don’t want to tell because no one has the right to demand access to my life.

The right to privacy rests largely on a presumption of innocence. It assumes that — in the absence of evidence of wrongdoing — an individual has a right to shut his front door and tell other people (including government) to mind their own business.

Today, this assumption has been twisted inside out so that a desire for privacy means you have something to hide. You are expected to prove your innocence by revealing every financial transaction, by filling in pages of government paperwork, by allowing state agents to frisk your person and property when you board a plane or enter a public building. These invasions rest upon the presumption of guilt.

Privacy is also is the single most effective means of preserving freedom against an encroaching state. The act of closing your front door expresses the key distinction between the private and public spheres.

The private sphere consists of the areas of life over which you, as a peaceful human being, exert absolute authority and into which the government or any other uninvited party cannot properly intrude. Traditionally, the home or family is viewed as the private sphere. But it also includes the food you eat, your sex life, the books you read, your opinions of life.

Continue Reading At: WhiskeyandGunpowder.com

Facebook Is a CIA & NSA Information Gathering Tool

Hello Big Brother – As Occupy Arrestees Arraigned, Iris Scans Affect Bail

InfoWars
Nick Pinto
villagevoice.com
March 20, 2012

The first of the more than 70 Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested Saturday afternoon and evening were arraigned yesterday in Manhattan Criminal Court.

Exhausted by a night and day in jail and shaken by the violence of the police response to Occupy Wall Street’s six-month anniversary celebration, many burst into tears of relief when they were finally released to the friendly welcome of the movement’s Jail Support team.

Unlike many of the other defendants with whom they shared cells, the protesters could feel confident that they would soon be released — Occupy posts bail for those arrested during movement actions.

But protesters and their legal advisers were surprised yesterday to learn that the size of their bail was being affected by whether defendants were willing to have the distinctive patterns of their irises photographed and logged into a database.

From: InfoWars.com
Read More At: villagevoice.com

ORWELL 1984 “RELOADED”: The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center

Via: BrotherJohnF
From: Global Research.ca
by James Bamford
March 19, 2012

Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz

The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.

Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.

But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.

The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

From: BrotherJohnF.com
Read More At: GlobalResearch.ca

A Blow to the Police State: Judge Rules Illinois Eavesdropping Law Unconstitutional

The Intel Hub
By Madison Ruppert
March 3, 2012

In a major victory for Americans who value liberty and the First Amendment, a Cook County, Illinois judge ruled that the state’s highly controversial eavesdropping law is unconstitutional.

The law made the simple act of recording a police officer without their consent, even during the course of their public duties, a felony offense.

Judge Stanley Sacks declared that the eavesdropping law is unconstitutional on the grounds that it has the potential to criminalize what would otherwise be “wholly innocent conduct.”

I couldn’t agree more, and it’s great to see that there are, in fact, some sane individuals working in the American justice system still.

I’ve been incredibly disillusioned by cases like that of Thomas Arthur and the wildly inconsistent prosecution of criminal acts, but this gave me a much-needed boost of hope.

The eavesdropping law, in principle, doesn’t seem like all that bad of an idea. After all, it is supposedly there to protect peoples’ private conversations from being recorded without their permission.

However, the way in which it was utilized was a different matter entirely.

Using this law to punish people for recording their interactions with police is patently absurd. The police are public servants carrying out public duties in public places, all funded by the taxpayer.

As a taxpayer, why shouldn’t you have a right to film your employee carrying out their public duties in a public area? It simply makes no sense.

The application of this law to encounters with police is based on the clearly erroneous idea that police have a reasonable expectation of privacy while performing said public duties.

If this was a case of an off-duty police officer being recorded in a private residence or other location in which they obviously had a reasonable expectation of privacy and were not engaging in public duties and therefore not being paid by the taxpayer, I would think that the application is fair.

Of course, that is far from how this law was applied in the case of Christopher Drew.

Drew is an artist who was arrested back in December of 2009 for selling art without a permit. After it was discovered that he had an audio recorder in his pocket capturing his conversations with the police officers, he was charged with a felony violation of Illinois’ eavesdropping law.

While the story at the Chicago Tribune ends there, some additional details can be found via Kevin Gosztola of FireDogLake.

“Drew, who has a history of challenging the city’s restrictions on the selling of art, was peddling silk-screened patches for $1 in an act of civil disobedience. A First Amendment lawyer and a team of photographers filmed his arrest,” Gozstola reports. “A First Amendment lawyer and a team of photographers filmed his arrest. The police let the filming go, and Drew was arrested. When it was time for Drew to face his charges, he found out he had been given a Class 1 felony charge for violating the Illinois Eavesdropping Act and filming his arrest. This meant he faced a possible sentence of fifteen years in prison.”

Gozstola reinforces my earlier point in highlighting the fact that Chicago police have leveraged the eavesdropping law not to protect the privacy of regular people but instead as a nice way to avoid lawsuits for the abuses police might carry out while on duty.

Gosztola cites an example from an Occupy Chicago demonstration as proof of this activity, “In the final days of January, Occupy Chicago was out protesting in the city when a police officer took a camera from someone who was live streaming the action and deleted the video. He told the live streamer, Keilah, that she could have been charged with a felony.”

In his article he says that while police may continue to try to arrest demonstrators under the eavesdropping law in order to avoid being filmed, any charges brought under the law are unlikely to hold up.

This is a huge step forward not only for what is commonly referred to as “citizen journalism” but also for those brave individuals who are on the front lines of protests across the country and recording police misconduct.

Furthermore, it is an even greater blow to the dualistic justice system which treats everyday Americans completely differently than an on duty police officer.

This will help keep police in Illinois accountable, especially during the upcoming protests focusing on the G8 and NATO summits. However, there have been some disturbingly draconian laws (not to mention the so-called “Trespass Bill”) put in place that might outweigh whatever benefits this latest ruling might have.

That being said, I don’t think that these facts diminish from the power that this decision could have on the future of the American police state.

Source: TheIntelHub.com