Even the mightiest have their come-uppance when their internal logic spews out destructiveness returning on the self—“blowback” in a way perhaps not seen before. I refer to James Risen’s extraordinary article in the New York Times, “Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater,” (June 30), in which the customary meaning of “blowback” refers to policies, e.g., the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, the “pivot” of military power to the Pacific intent on the encirclement, containment, isolation of China, produce unintended, or if intended, still unwelcome, consequences for the initiator of the policy or action.
Thus: Iraq, out-of-control (from the US standpoint, a raging civil war negating massive intervention and alerting the world to America’s hegemonic purposes); Afghanistan, original support of the Taliban against the Soviet Union, resulting in their material strengthening now turned against the US, endangering its power-position in the region; use of Ukraine as a basis for bringing NATO forces to the Russian border, now an overreach which may disrupt the EU and weaken US dominance over it; and blatant confrontation with China, both military and trade, with potential for war leading to nuclear annihilation. The status and role of world policeman is losing its blackjack, its reputation as global bully being challenged through the rise of multiple power-centers and industrial-commercial-financial patterns no longer defined, supervised, indeed controlled, by American global interests and military implementation.
That is blowback in its familiar guise. Less so, the self-chosen instruments of repression spilling out of behemoth’s mouth because America’s dependence on repression to secure its aims makes it dependent as well on the executors of repression, in this case, given the extreme stress on privatization (the core of the monster’s functional existence), Blackwater at your service, a private army on hire to USG for pursuit of the dirty work, deemed necessary, yet, delegated to official forces, the cause of embarrassment and shame. Browbeating indigenous populations, with an overwhelming swagger and display in the grand tradition of conquerors, in addition to protecting representatives of the conquerors, is a mission worthy, as here, of billion dollar contracts to the private militias (euphemism: “security guards”) as insurance the military victory and occupation will hold.
Here Blackwater is, and is treated as, inseparable from the intervention (read: conquest) itself, at times assisting in the fighting on an informal basis—it has not yet been invited to join NATO(!)—but more to the point, the intimidating presence in the post-military phase, as though instilling the message: You Iraqis think the military is bad, well don’t mess around, for far worse awaits you, we former Navy SEALS know nothing can touch us. Our motto might as well be, A Law Unto Ourselves, even USG—beyond the status-of-forces agreement it forced your government to sign—afraid of us. Blowback: the cancer in the bowels of behemoth rapidly spreading to the extremities, spinal column, brain. Soon we shall all be made over in the image of Blackwater, or rather, as Blackwater would like to see, as its actions show, America become, a nation subservient to its thugs, extolling martial glory for its own sake and for the sake of global dominance. Authoritarianism once off the ground knows no limits and demands the complete adherence of its subjects. America has lived with CIA for decades; Blackwater is icing on the cake.
***
Before turning to the evidence contained in James Risen’s article, it is important to see how events from the past are converging on the present. His credentials as a whistleblower are borne out by his previous record (exposure of CIA dirty tricks, in his book State of War, with respect to Iran’s nuclear program) and current circumstances (he faces a possible jail sentence for refusing to disclose, from that account, the identity of an anonymous source). In the Bush doghouse for exposing the use of warrantless wire taps in 2005, and now, Obama contemplating more serious action, jail time for not complying with a DOJ subpoena, possibly leading to an Espionage Act prosecution, for which Obama excels over all of his predecessors combined (liberals, of course, furiously denying the sordid record), Risen not only stares down his persecutors, Obama, Holder, DOJ, but here presents an exposure in some ways more damning of US baseness from the top down, nurturing a murderous nest in the structure of government.
As for the administration hounding, Jonathan Mahler’s New York Times article, “Reporter’s Case Poses Dilemma for Justice Dept.,” (June 27), implies that Risen’s refusal to be intimidated is causing Obama and Holder second thoughts about pushing for his imprisonment. According to John Rizzo, CIA’s acting general counsel, Bush people wanted State of War kept off the market—too late, however. Risen then was subpoenaed to testify against the suspected leaker—and refused. “More than six years of legal wrangling,” in what Mahler terms “the most serious confrontation between the government and the press in recent history,” is coming to a head. Risen “is now out of challenges. Early this month, the Supreme Court declined to review his case, a decision that allows prosecutors to compel his testimony.”
But The Times, in defending its own man, cannot strongly protest, lest it antagonize the White House. Yes, Obama appears to be in a bind: “Though the court’s decision looked like a major victory for the government, it has forced the Obama administration to confront a hard choice. Should it demand Mr. Risen’s testimony and be responsible for a reporter’s being sent to jail? Or reverse course and stand down, losing credibility with an intelligence community that has pushed for the aggressive prosecution of leaks?” If Obama and USG were truly democratic (small “d”), there should not be a choice but only one course of action, moreover reigning in the “intelligence community” serving under their control.
The reporter, I believe reflecting the paper’s view, however, credits the Obama administration with actually weighing alternatives and being capable of making moral choices: “The dilemma comes at a critical moment for an administration that has struggled to find a balance between aggressively enforcing laws against leaking and demonstrating concern for civil liberties and government transparency.” What balance? What concern? Everything points the other way, on both civil liberties (e.g., due process and habeas corpus rights for detainees) and government transparency (simply, a thick protective shield in place, symbolized by the high art of redaction—and, as with Blackwater’s killing sprees, the refusal or half-heartedness about prosecution). Its reporter’s back against the wall, NYT ignores the Espionage Act prosecutions of whistleblowers.
Mahler succinctly describes the reporting: “The failed C.I.A. action at the heart of Mr. Risen’s reporting was intended to sabotage Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Intelligence officials assigned a former Russian scientist who had defected to the United States to deliver a set of faulty blueprints for a nuclear device to an Iranian scientist. But the Russian scientist became nervous and informed the Iranians that the plans were flawed.” One readily appreciates the dangers to the National Security State, especially revelations of the stupidity and dangerousness of its crown jewel, CIA, posed by investigative journalism. The Times, to its everlasting shame, bowed to Coldoleezza Rice’s request to withhold publication of the article. As a Times spokesperson later declared, “We weighed the government’s concerns and the usual editorial considerations and decided not to run the story.” Hence, James Risen—enemy of National Security; he “broke the story” later in State of War. Yet Bush is not the only culprit in this story; Obama ordered two additional subpoenas to force Risen to testify, his DOJ going after him hammer-and-tongs: “After a trial court largely quashed his third subpoena [the first under Bush] in late 2010, the Justice Department successfully challenged the ruling in a federal appeals court, arguing that the First Amendment does not afford any special protections to journalists.” Enough said about the dedication to civil liberties and freedom of the press: “The administration then urged the Supreme Court not to review Mr. Risen’s case.”
***
I have already discussed the mass killings in Nisour Square, Baghdad, in a previous article. Now we learn that this was part of a pattern in Blackwater’s behavior—again, Risen’s reporting. Even for one who is a seasoned critic, it is painful for me to write about. Organized thuggery knows no limits particularly when working for the highest authority, immunity from punishment worn as a badge of honor, as meanwhile government officials hide their eyes. Risen writes, “Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: ‘that he could kill’ the government’s chief investigator and ‘no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,’ according to department reports.” A private contractor threatens the life of a State Department investigator! No reprisal, punishment, cancellation of the contract, not even disclosure of the threat—yet Blackwater still in place years later, as part of the silence on atrocities in the Obama-Hillary era.
Those 17 killed are on America’s hands, bloody hands. There was a clear warning about what to expect: “After returning to Washington, the chief investigator wrote a scathing report to State Department officials documenting misconduct by Blackwater employees and warning that lax oversight of the company, which had a contract worth more than $1 billion to protect American diplomats, had created ‘an environment full of liability and negligence.’” Even more outrageous, Risen notes, the investigators become the criminals gumming up the security works: “American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.”
Jean Richter, lead investigator, wrote, in a memo to the State Department only weeks prior to Nisour Square: “’The management structures in place to manage and monitor our contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractors themselves. Blackwater contractors saw themselves as above the law…. ‘hands off’ [management meant that] the contractors, instead of Department officials, are in command and in control.’” Now, nearly seven years later, four Blackwater guards are on trial, facing, if ever convicted, watered down charges, this being “ the government’s second attempt to prosecute the case in an American court [I wonder how serious the effort under Holder and Obama] after previous charges against five guards were dismissed in 2009.” Much of the time this is on Obama’s watch, yet, “despite a series of investigations in the wake of Nisour Square, the back story of what happened with Blackwater and the embassy in Baghdad before the fateful shooting has never been fully told.”
So much for transparency, civil liberties, and prosecuting the crimes of a predecessor (the cardinal rule of presidents, at least this one, cover-up WAR CRIMES past and present, a solemn command of the National Security State). Silence and deniability, in all matters large and small, characterize the responses of USG and private principals: “The State Department declined to comment on the aborted investigation. A spokesman for Erik Prince, the founder and former chief executive of Blackwater, who sold the company in2010, said Mr. Prince had never been told about the matter.” The $1B contract itself testifies to the fusion of patriotism, secrecy, repression, and yes, corporate profit: “After Mr. Prince sold the company, the new owners named it Academi. In early June, it merged with Triple Canopy, one of its rivals for government and commercial contracts to provide private security. The new firm is called Constellis Holdings.” Like war, private security stands to make a killing (pardon the pun), no doubt in flight from the original name for damage-control and public-relations purposes.
Previous to Nisour Square (Sept. 16, 2007) Blackwater guards “acquired a reputation…for swagger and recklessness,” but complaints “about practices ranging from running cars off the road to shooting wildly in the streets and even killing civilians typically did not result in serious action by the United States or the Iraqi government.” After firing in the Square, there was closer scrutiny, the Blackwater claim that they were fired on even US military officials denied, and “[f]ederal prosecutors later said Blackwater personnel had shot indiscriminately with automatic weapons, heavy machine guns and grenade launchers.” To no avail, given the symbiotic relationship between the company and the government. In fact, Blackwater had itself been run by Prince as a nation in microcosm, its people shortly before Nisour Square gathered by him at company headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina and made to “swear an oath of allegiance” like the one required of enlistees in the US military. They were handed copies of the oath, which, after reciting the words, were told to sign.
The State Department investigation into Blackwater in Iraq, which began Aug. 1, 2007 and was slated for one month, led early to the “volatile” situation (including the death threat), our knowledge coming from “internal State Department documents” furnished “to plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Blackwater that was unrelated to the Nisour Square shootings,” seemingly by accident then and fleshed out by Risen. In that month—or that part of it before being forced to leave– the investigators discovered “a long list of contract violations by Blackwater,” staffing changes of security details “without State Department approval,” reducing the number of guards on details, “storing automatic weapons and ammunition in their private rooms, where they were drinking heavily and partying with frequent female visitors,” and, for many, failing “to regularly qualify on their weapons” or “carrying weapons on which they had never been certified” nor “authorized to use.” Extravagance for mayhem abroad, less than peanuts for critical needs at home, education, health care, employment, beyond the means or reach of Imperial grandeur as the national obsession.
In addition to “overbilling the State Department by manipulating its personnel records, using guards assigned to the State Department contract for other work and falsifying other staffing data on the contract,” (no wonder the investigators’ poor reception by Blackwater’s resident head in Iraq), one of its affiliates forced “third country nationals” who did the dirty work at low wages “to live in squalid conditions, sometimes three to a cramped room with no bed,” according to the investigators’ report. Their conclusion: “Blackwater was getting away with such conduct because embassy personnel had gotten too close to the contractor.”
Ah, the denouement; we have a name to go with the face of the project manager who threatened Richter’s life, Daniel Carroll, who said he could kill him without anything happening to himself “as we were in Iraq” (this was witnessed by Donald Thomas, the other investigator), and Richter, in his memo to the Department stated: “I took Mr. Carroll’s threat seriously. We were in a combat zone where things can happen unexpectedly, especially when issues involve potentially negative impacts on a lucrative security contract.” Nicely put, and corroborated by Thomas, who wrote in a separate memo that “others in Baghdad had told the two investigators to be ‘very careful,’ considering that their review could jeopardize job security for Blackwater personnel.” The wonder perhaps is that Richter and Thomas were not prosecuted under the Espionage Act for spoiling the show. It didn’t matter. No one at State listened.
The two men were ordered to leave (Aug 23), and “cut short their inquiry and returned to Washington the next day.” Finally, on Oct. 5, after the Nisour Square scandal, State Department officials responded to Richter’s “August warning,” and took statements from him and Thomas about “their accusations of a threat by Mr. Carroll, but took no further action.” A special panel convened by Rice on Nisour Square “never interviewed Mr. Richter or Mr. Thomas.” The official who led the panel “told reporters on Oct. 23, 2007, that the panel had not found any communications from the embassy in Baghdad before the Nisour Square shooting that raised concerns about contractor conduct.” Voila, vanished in thin air. This State Department officer deserves the last word: “We interviewed a large number of individuals. We did not find any, I think, significant pattern of incidents that had not—that the embassy had suppressed in any way.” And my last word: fascism. Beyond all structural-cultural-societal considerations about wealth-concentration, industrial-financial consolidation, foreign expansion through preponderant power and the spirit of militarism, the rampaging privatization with government consent witnessed here, which has wreaked havoc on another people, only to be covered over by the state, aka, the National Security State, disregarding its Constitutional protections to the individual, as in sponsoring massive surveillance, is enough for me to satisfy the working definition of that single word.
via Norman Pollack has written on Populism. His interests are social theory and the structural analysis of capitalism and fascism. He can be reached at [email protected].
NSA says it has no idea how much US info it collects, but FBI searches for it so much it can’t count how many times.
The blowback against the National Security Agency has long focused on the unpopular Patriot Act surveillance program that allows the NSA to vacuum up billions of US phone records each year. But after a rush of attention this week, some much deserved focus is back on the surveillance state’s other seemingly limitless program: the warrantless searches made possible by Section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act, which allows the NSA to do all sorts of spying on Americans and people around the world – all for reasons that, in most cases, have nothing to do with terrorism.
The long awaited draft report from the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB) on this subject was finally released Tuesday night, and it gives Americans a fairly detailed look unclassified at how the NSA spies through its notorious Prism program – and how it snoops “upstream” (a euphemism for the agency’s direct access to entire internet streams at telecoms like AT&T). The board issued a scathing report on the Patriot Act surveillance months ago, but oddly they went the opposite route this time around.
While many of the details are interesting, the board’s new report recommends no systematic changes to the several disturbing privacy issues covered therein. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (my former employer) issued a scathing PCLOB review late Tuesday night, calling the report “legally flawed and factually incomplete” and saying it ignored the “essential privacy problem … that the government has access to or is acquiring nearly all communications that travel over the Internet.”
As usual, it’s the Edward Snowden revelations that give context to all the snooping – and provide the impetus to keep pushing for real reform. Some 36 hours before the latest PCLOB report was made public, the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima and Barton Gellman disclosed previously unreleased Snowden documents showing that true scope of “702”-style information sweeps:
Virtually no foreign government is off-limits for the National Security Agency, which has been authorized to intercept information from individuals ‘concerning’ all but four countries on Earth.
As the Post reports, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s interpretation of the the Fisa Amendments Act is so broad, it “could allow for surveillance of academics, journalists and human-rights researchers.”
Fisa Amendments Act surveillance also includes scanning the emails of Americans never even accused of a crime. It’s the Snowden revelations that originally led the New York Times to report last year any conversation you’ve ever had with someone outside the country may be fair game under the act, as the NSA “is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country who mention information about foreigners under surveillance.”
Perhaps in an attempt to pre-empt the PCLOB report, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper finally just released what he promised Sen Ron Wyden months ago: the number of warrantless searches by the US government on American communications in its vast databases of information collected under the Fisa Amendments Act. This is the second giant problem with 702 surveillance. Wyden refers to these as “backdoor” searches since they’re performed using data supposedly collected for “foreign intelligence” purposes – even though they still suck up huge amounts of purely US information. And it’s exactly the type of search the House overwhelmingly voted to ban in its surprise vote two weeks ago.
The NSA conducted “backdoor” searches 198 times in 2013 (and another 9,500 for internet metadata on Americans). Curiously, the CIA conducts far more warrantless searches of American information in the NSA databases than the NSA itself – almost 10 times more. But the FBI was the worst culprit, querying data on Americans so many times it couldn’t even count. The DNI left it at this: “the FBI believes the number of queries is substantial.”
The FBI has always been the NSA’s silent partner in all its surveillance and has long been suspected of doing the dirty work on Americans’ data after it’s been collected by NSA.
Wyden, who has for years repeatedly pushed for this information to be released to the public, responded:
When the FBI says it conducts a substantial number of searches and it has no idea of what the number is, it shows how flawed this system is and the consequences of inadequate oversight. This huge gap in oversight is a problem now, and will only grow as global communications systems become more interconnected.
The PCLOB also went on to reveal in its report that the FBI can search the vast Prism database for crimes that have nothing to do with terrorism, or even national security. Oh, and how many US persons have had their data collected through Prism and other 702 programs? That government has no idea.
Unfortunately, the PCLOB chickened out of making any real reform proposals, leading Politico’s Josh Gerstein to point out that the Republican-controlled House already endorsed more aggressive reforms than the civil liberties board. More bizarrely, one of the holdouts on the panel for calling for real reform is supposed to be a civil liberties advocate. The Center for Democracy and Technology’s vice president, James Dempsey, had the chance to side with two other, more liberal members on the five-person panel to recommend the FBI get court approval before rummaging through the NSA’s vast databases, but shamefully he didn’t.
Now, as the Senate takes up a weakened House bill along with the House’s strengthened backdoor-proof amendment, it’s time to put focus back on sweeping reform. And while the PCLOB may not have said much in the way of recommendations, now Congress will have to. To help, a coalition of groups (including my current employer, Freedom of the Press Foundation) have graded each and every representative in Washington on the NSA issue. The debate certainly isn’t going away – it’s just a question of whether the public will put enough pressure on Congress to change.
The history of pilotless aircraft in the United States military stretches back to the days of the Wright brothers. It’s difficult to describe any good that emerges from warfare, but many modern technological advancements — computers, zippers, microwaves — can be traced back to conflicts of a bygone era. Today unmanned aerial vehicles are being used by a whole slew of people, the U.S. Department of Defense being just one primary example. While drones have been used routinely to support or undertake lethal force abroad for over a decade, their domestic applications are just now being given more serious consideration. The capabilities and contributions of UAVs have, up until recently, been propelled more or less exclusively by the defense community. UAV technology may currently be associated with what some would consider secretive and nefarious militarism, but in examining the range of practical, commercial applications we can only hope that drone technology will begin to move away from the dark side.
President Obama’s approach to counterterrorism has been marked by his embrace of drone technology to target terrorist operatives. But they’ve come a long way since their first strike operations: drone backpacks are now used by soldiers, and Predator drones come equipped with even more powerful warheads. U.S. DOD spending on drones increased from $284M in 2000 to $3.3B in October of 2012. Small surveillance drones, called Cicadas, are now being released from balloons to collect data on the ground in Iraq. In short, the military has a seemingly infinite range of uses for unmanned aerial vehicles, large and small. And the scope of drone missions only continues to expand, as the technology necessary to program and operate them becomes at once more commonplace and versatile. Over the next decade, the Pentagon anticipates that the number of “multirole” UAVs (those capable of both spying and striking) will nearly quadruple.
As of October 2013, the Federal Aviation Administration had issued 285 clearance certificates for drones inside the United States. Under pressure from the Unmanned Systems Caucus (or drone lobby) the Department of Homeland Security has accepted eight Predator drones for use along the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico borders. The FAA is set to further open skies to commercial drones by 2015, allowing civilians to finally explore and expand upon the uses of UAV technology. But even with the law by their side, can civilian companies ever hope to utilize drones to the extent in which they are employed by the military? Many recognize the civil potential of flying robots, but recognize that with certain valuable contributions also comes the possibility of tighter law enforcement and increased government surveillance.
The dualistic nature of drones is being explored by hobbyists and venture capitalists alike. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is even developing a program that will employ drones and satellite internet to deliver internet to disenfranchised communities throughout the world. While this probably speaks to Zuckerberg’s opportunism (and his desire to compete in the marketplace against Google’s Loon Project and HughesNet Internet) that isn’t to say that people in underserved communities don’t stand to benefit. The U.S. government already uses drones to protect endangered wildlife species, like the sandhill crane, and researchers in Indonesia and Malaysia are also using unmanned aerial devices to monitor the activity of similarly threatened orangutan populations. UAV systems are emerging as key tools in agricultural innovation and the monitoring of natural resources. Search and rescue missions, 3-D mapping and surveying projects, and hurricane tracking projects are also being carried out by UAVs. With unmanned aircraft, it seems the sky’s the limit for civil and commercial usage.
But the business of drones still comes with plenty of risks. The American Civil Liberties Union has warned of a “dystopian future” in which “mass, suspicionless searches of the general population” are the norm. Given the history of drones as advanced tools of the government and military, this doesn’t seem like an empty threat. And for now, the law still stands in the way of any real development on the commercial end. Despite the fact that many ideas for drones, from the delivery of Amazon parcels to Domino’s pizzas, have been suggested, the military still holds the key to their innovation from an American standpoint. Their function as a militaristic tool remains at the forefront of their continued growth, resulting in large spending increases for advanced cameras, sensors, and systems with attack capabilities. But the integration of drone technology into domestic airspace by law enforcement — and later, by corporations — seems inevitable. As technological improvements continue to catapult the UAV industry into the future, the true beneficiaries of these developments remain to be seen.
History was made today in a NYC courtroom with the extra-leniant sentencing of notorious Anonymous hacker turned FBI Informant ‘Sabu’ otherwise known as Hector Xavier Monsegur. But, what if things are not what they appear to be?
When considering history in hindsight, things were rarely what they seemed at the time. Cybersecurity drama and events should be held in similar regard, as the game of smoke and mirrors has never been more applicable than within the globally distributed Internet and its ‘security mechanisms’. Lets take a moment to consider the recent developments with this case and look at the sentencing from a different perspective.
Federal agents and LEAs accross the globe have been known to bend the rules, outright lie, or falsify evidence to suit their best interest. Not in pursuit of truth nor justice, but instead in pursuit of ‘winning’ at whatever cost. Another subject entirely, but it remains a fundamental pillar to this overall hypothesis.. What if Sabu never flipped, and [for reasons still unclear] they are only providing the illusion that he has?
Virtually everything known about how these ‘hacks’ unfolded has been described only by Court Documents and MSM/Fox News opinion of those documents. When considering that the messaging is one sided, it becomes even more interesting when observing how hard the MSM and FBI have pushed this message, which is that ‘Sabu turned informant on a dime’.
Judge Preska, being the wife of a hacked stratfor client, was arguably conflicted from start in Jeremy Hammond’s case, the individual who allegedly hacked Stratfor at behest of Sabu & the FBI. Today, this same judge not only provided a lenient sentence on Hector, but offered a public and glowing praise of the effectiveness of his efforts in subsequent critical takedowns. This is highly suspicious, as a ‘real’ thank you from a judge should be a sealed case, and witness protection. What the message actually sounded like was a backhanded compliment meaning ‘thanks for nothing, and good luck with the death threats’.
Love him or hate him, Sabu isn’t stupid. Certainly not, if he’s capable of doing all of these things the government claims he can do. In that assumption, one would allso assume he would outright demand protection, and probably future employment. What’s the point of flipping on multiple high value targets, if the end result is a publicly announced ‘time served’ with release back into a furious community, hated & minimum-wage forever? Finding a highly intelligent hacker that would agree to this, is incredibly unrealistic.
Taking an objective look at all the evidence, without bias, another theory can emerge. While it’s not much, there are historical Tweets and leaked IRC conversations to keep in mind, that may tell another side of the story. In a final Twitter posting, Sabu calls out the FBI for ‘being cowards, and not to give in’. Another post on the day before going dark, reminiscent of a yet-to-leak Snowden, Sabu describes invasive & illegal government spying, and hints that ‘informants & corporate compliance’ as the government’s only real tools. Some would just say he’s only playing the part. Others could say those tweets were a deliberate slap in the face, and evidence of non-compliance.
In those leaked IRC conversations, if believed are legitimate, outline some additional possibilities and variations to the actual events as we understand them.
You’ll find that m45t3rs4d0w8 (aka Sanguinarious) brings up the false flag possibility, and they discuss the lies of FoxNews and how ‘anons believe anything’ and ‘dont ask the right questions’. Later in the leaked record, its discussed how the MSM lied about how he was caught. It should be noted that alledged LulSec accomplice, JoePie91 also believes there are inconsitencies with the Sabu story, and how he was nabbed, as documented on his blog March 10, 2012 shortly after Sabu’s public arrest.
In what could be most telling, m45t3rs4d0w8 not Sabu that then explains “regarding those things they ‘said’ you did” he noticed some court documentation doesnt make sense, has missing dates, and possibly falsified Witness and Defendant signatures. Sabu replies, “Good things to question, sadly no one is questioning like you are”.
Other final bits to mention would be Sabu’s talk of return. “I cant wait until i’m sentenced so i can finally get the truth out”, and his disgust of LEA/FBI manipulations, “they will go through your entire life… they will find a way to blackmail your a**. I’m not even ****ing exaggerating.”
Journalism requires critical thinking in order to truly get the message across. Proposed are critical unanswered questions:
Q. If Sabu is cooperating with such efficiency, why is gov’t hanging him out to dry?
No Witness Protection Offered nor Demanded? No Sealed Case (to Protect the Informant)?
Anyone else in Sabu’s shoes would likely have said “OK, you got me, i’ll cooperate. But you’re going to seal this case, and give me witness protection. Otherwise the public will crucify me”.
Q. Is there a chance that Sabu was apprehended, but the FBI simply used his alias to entrap Hammond / Davis / Ackroyd/ etc by themselves?
What proof do we really have that Hector himself is responsible?
Q. Could the FBI have decided that publicly promoting Sabu as a crucial Anonymous Informant was a most effective way to ‘make the FBI look good’, whether true or not?
If Sabu had not flipped, do we believe the FBI would admit this failure? Does the FBI have the will & means to falsify this into reality?
In conclusion, opinion should still be out on whether Hector Xavier Monesgur deserves the landslide of lambasting. It would be wise to dig deeper, withhold some bias (towards the incarcerated) and keep in mind…
“All warfare, is based on deception..” Sun Tzu
Who will be the first to interview Xavier, and ask these and likely more very important questions?
Below is a listing of nicknames and codewords related to US Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Communications Security (COMSEC). Most of them are from the NSA, some are from other government or military agencies. Some of them also have an abbreviation which is shown in brackets.
NICKNAMES are generally unclassified. NSA uses single word nicknames, outside NSA they usually consist of two separate words, with the first word selected from alphabetical blocks that are assigned to different agencies by the Joint Staff. Usually, nicknames are printed using all capital letters.
CODEWORDS are always classified and always consist of a single word. Active codewords, or their three-letter abbreviations, which identify a classification compartment always need to be shown in the classification or banner line. Normally, codewords are printed using all capital letters.
Due to very strict secrecy, it’s not always clear whether we see a nickname or a codeword, but terms mentioned in public sources like job descriptions are of course unclassified nicknames.
Please keep in mind that a listing like this will always be work in progress (this list has been copied on some other websites and forums, but only this one is being updated frequently!).
BASECOAT – Program targeting the mobile phone network on the Bahamas
BASTE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
– Type 1 Block cipher algorithm, used with many crypto products
BEACHHEAD – Computer exploit delivered by the FERRETCANON system
BEAMER – ?
BELLTOPPER – NSA database
BELLVIEW – SIGINT reporting tool
– List of personnel cleared for access to highly sensitive information or operations
BINOCULAR – Former NSA intelligence dissemination tool
BIRCHWOOD – Upstream collection site
BLACKBOOK – ODNI tool for large-scale semantic data analysis
BLACKFOOT – The French mission at the United Nations in New York
BLACKHEART – Collection through FBI implants
BLACKMAGIC – NSA database or tool
BLACKPEARL – NSA database of survey/case notations(?)
BLACKWATCH – NSA reporting tool
– Program for intercepting phone and internet traffic at switches in the US (since 1978)
BLINDDATE – Hacking tools for WLAN collection, plus GPS
BLUEANCHOR – Partner providing a network access point for the YACHTSHOP program
BLUEFISH (BLFH) – Compartment of the KLONDIKE control system
BLUEZEPHYR – Sub-program of OAKSTAR
BOOTY – Retired SIGINT product codeword
– DNI and DNR metadata visualization tool
BOURBON – Joint NSA and GCHQ program for breaking Soviet encryption codes (1946-?)
BROKENRECORD – NSA tool
BROKENTIGO – Tool for computer network operations
BROADSIDE – Covert listening post in the US embassy in Moscow
BROOMSTICK – ?
BRUNEAU – Operation against the Italian embassy in Washington DC using LIFESAVER techniques
BRUTUS – Tool or program related to MARINA
BUFFALOGREEN – The name ORANGECRUSH was known to Polish partners
BULLDOZER – PCI bus hardware implant on intercepted shipping
– An NSA COI for decryption of network communications
BULLSEYE – NSG High-Frequency Direction-Finding (HF-DF) network (now called CROSSHAIR)
(BYE) – Retired SCI control system for overhead collection systems (1961-2005)
BYZANTINE – First word of nicknames for programs involving defense against Chinese cyber-warfare and US offensive cyber-warfare
BYZANTINE ANCHOR (BA) – A group of Chinese hackers which compromised multiple US government and defense contractor systems since 2003
BYZANTINE CANDOR (BC) – A group of Chinese hackers which compromised a US-based ISP and at least one US government agency
BYZANTINE FOOTHOLD (BF) – A group of Chinese hackers who attacked various international companies and internet services providers
BYZANTINE HADES (BH) – A concerted effort against Chinese hackers who attacked the Pentagon and military contractors. Probably renamed to the LEGION-series
C
CADENCE – NSA database with tasking dictionaries
CAJABLOSSOM – Automated system for analysing and profiling internet browsing histories
CALYPSO – Remote SATCOM collection facility
CANDYGRAM – Laptop mimicking GSM cell tower, sends out SMS whenever registered target enters its area, for tracking and ID of targets
– Class of COMINT spy satellites (1968-1977)
CANOE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
CANNON LIGHT – Counterintelligence database of the US Army
CAPRICORN – (former?) database for voice data
CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE – Computer implant plug-in to take over a targeted computer’s microphone and record conversations taking place near the device
CARBOY – Second Party satellite intercept station at Bude, England
CARBOY II – Units of ECHELON which break down satellite links into telephone and telegraph channels
CARILLON – NSA high performance computing center, since 1976 made up of IBM 360s and later four IBM 3033s
CASport – NSA user authorization service
– Computer system capable of automatically analyzing the massive quantities of data gathered across the entire intelligence community
CENTER ICE – Data center for the exchange of intelligence regarding Afghanistan among the members of the 14-Eyes/SSEUR
CENTERMASS – NSA tool or database
CERF CALL MOSES1 – Contact Event Record Format – for certain telephony metadata
CHALKFUN – Analytic tool, used to search the FASCIA database
CHASEFALCON – Major program of the Global Access Operations (GAO)
CHEER – Retired SIGINT product codeword
CHESS – Compartment of TALENT KEYHOLE for the U-2 spy plane
CHEWSTICK – NSA tool or database
CHIMNEYPOOL – Framework or specification of GENIE-compliance for hardware/software implants
CHIPPEWA – Some communications network, involving Israel
CHUTE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
CIMBRI – Probably a metadata database
CINEPLEX – NSA tool or database
CLASSIC BULLSEYE – Worldwide ocean SIGINT surveillance system (1960’s-?)
CLEVERDEVICE – Upstream collection site
CLOUD – NSA database
COASTLINE – NSA tool or database
COBALTFALCON – Sub-program of OAKSTAR
COBRA FOCUS – NSA-G operations center for producing intelligence from Iraq
COGNOS – NSA tool or database
CORDOBA – Type 2 Cryptographic algorithm used in a number of crypto chips
COMBAT SENT – Reconaissance operation
COMMONDEER – Computer exploit for looking whether a computer has security software
COMMONVIEW – NSA database or tool
CONFIRM – NSA database for personell access
CONJECTURE – Network compatible with HOWLERMONKEY
CONTRAOCTAVE – NSA telephony tasking database Used to determine ‘foreigness’
CONVEYANCE – Voice content ingest processor
COPILOT – System that automatically scans digital data for things like language, phone and creditcard numbers and attachments
COPSE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
CORALINE – NSA satellite intercept station at Sabena Seca at Puerto Rico (closed)
CORALREEF – Database for VPN crypto attack data
– A series of photographic surveillance satellites (1959-1972)
CO-TRAVELER – Set of tools for finding unknown associates of intelligence targets by tracking movements based upon cell phone locations
COTTONMOUTH (CM) – Computer implant devices used by NSA’s TAO division
COTTONMOUTH-I (CM-I) – USB hardware implant providing wireless bridge into target network and loading of exploit software onto target PCs, formerly DEWSWEEPER
COTTONMOUTH-II (CM-II) – USB hardware host tap provides covert link over USP into target’s network co-located with long haul relay; dual-stacked USB connector, consists of CM-I digital hardware plus long haul relay concealed in chassis; hub with switches is concealed in a dual stacked USB connector and hard-wired to provide intra-chassis link.
COTTONMOUTH-III (CM-III) – Radio Frequency link for commands to software implants and data infiltration/exfiltration, short range inter-chassis link within RJ45 Dual Stacked USB connector
COURIERSKILL – NSA Collection mission system
COWBOY – The DICTIONARY computer used at the Yakima station of ECHELON
CRANKSHAFT – Codename for Osama bin Laden
CREAM – Retired SIGINT product codeword
CREDIBLE – Transport of intelligence materials to partner agencies
CREST – Database that automatically translates foreign language intercepts in English
CRISSCROSS – Database of telecommunications selectors
CROSSBEAM – GSM module mating commercial Motorola cell with WagonBed controller board for collecting voice data content via GPRS (web), circuit-switched data, data over voice, and DTMF to secure facility, implanted cell tower switch
CRUMPET – Covert network with printer, server and desktop nodes
CULTWEAVE – Smaller size SIGINT database
CYBERTRANS – A common interface to a number of underlying machine translation systems
CYCLONE Hx9 – Base station router, network in a box using Typhon interface
D
DAFF – Codeword for products of satellite imagery
DAMEON – Remote SATCOM collection facility
DANCINGOASIS (DGO) – SSO program collecting data from fiber optic cables between Europe and the Far East (since 2011)
DANDERSPRITZ – Software tool that spoofs IP and MAC addresses, intermediate redirector node
DANGERMOUSE – Tactical SIGINT collecting system for like cell phone calls
DARDANUS – Remote SATCOM collection facility
DAREDEVIL – Shooter/implant as part of the QUANTUM system
DARKTHUNDER – SSO Corporate/TAO Shaping program
DARKQUEST – Automated FORNSAT survey system
DAUNT – Retired SIGINT product codeword
DECKPIN – NSA crisis cell activated during emergencies
DEEPDIVE – An XKEYSCORE related method
DEITYBOUNCE – Provides implanted software persistence on Dell PowerEdge RAID servers via motherboard BIOS using Intel’s System Management Mode for periodic execution, installed via ArkStream to reflash the BIOS
DELTA – Former SCI control system for intercepts from Soviet military operations
DENIM – Retired SIGINT product codeword
DESPERADO – NSA software tool to prepare reports
DEWSWEEPER – Technique to tap USB hardware hosts
DIKTER – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Norway
DINAR – Retired compartment for intercepts from foreign embassies in Washington
DIONYSUS – Remote SATCOM collection facility
DIRESCALLOP – Method to circumvent commercial products that prevent malicious software from making changes to a computer system
DISCOROUTE – A tool for targeting passively collected telnet sessions
– NSA database for text messages (SMS)
DISTANTFOCUS – A pod for tactical SIGINT and precision geolocation (since 2005)
DIVERSITY – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
DOBIE – The South African consulate and mission at the UN in New York
DOCKETDICTATE – Something related to NSA’s TAO division
DOGCOLLAR – A type of Question-Focussed Dataset based on the Facebook display name cookie
DOGHUT – Upstream collection site
DOUBLEARROW – One of NSA’s voice processing databases?
DRAGGABLEKITTEN – An XKEYSCORE Map/Reduce analytic
DREADNOUGHT – NSA operation focused on Ayatollah Khamenei
– Passive collection of emanations (e.g. from printers or faxes) by using a radio frequency antenna
DROPOUTJEEP – STRAITBIZARRE-based software implant for iPhone, initially close access but later remotely
– System for processing data from mobile communication networks
DRUID – SIGINT Exchange Designator for third party countries
– A US military numeral cipher/authentication system
DRYTORTUGAS – Analytic tool
DYNAMO – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Denmark
E
EAGLE – Upstream collection site
– A SIGINT collection network run by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States
ECHO – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Australia
ECRU (EU) – Compartment of the ENDSEAL control system
EDEN – Upstream collection site
EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE (EGGI) – NSA program for exploiting the TOR network
EGOTISTICALGOAT (EGGO) – NSA tool for exploiting the TOR network
EIDER – Retired SIGINT product codeword
EINSTEIN – Cell phone network intercepting equipment used by SCS units
– Intrusion detection system for US government network gateways (deployed in 2004)
EINSTEIN 2 – Second version of the EINSTEIN program for detecting malicious network activity
EINSTEIN 3 – Third version of the EINSTEIN program that will monitor government computer traffic on private sector sites too
ELEGANTCHAOS – Large scale FORNSAT data analysis system
EMBRACEFLINT – Tool for computer network operations
ENDSEAL (EL) – SCI control system
ENDUE – A COI for sensitive decrypts of the BULLRUN program
ENTOURAGE – Directional finder for line of bearing for GSM, UMTS, CDMA, FRS signals, works with NEBULA active interrogator within GALAXY program
EPICSHELTER – Sophisticated data backup system designed by Edward Snowden
ERRONEOUSINGENUITY (ERIN) – NSA tool for exploiting the TOR network
EVENINGEASEL – Program for surveillance of phone and text communications from Mexico’s cell phone network
EVILOLIVE – Iinternet geolocation tool
EVOLVED MUTANT BROTH – Second party database
EYESPY – System that scans data for logos of companies, political parties and other organizations, as well for pictures with faces for facial recognition
F
FACELIFT – Codeword related to NSA’s Special Source Operations division
– NSA corporate partner with access to international cables, routers, and switches (since 1985)
FAIRVIEWCOTS – System for processing telephony metadata collected under the FAIRVIEW program
FALLENORACLE – NSA tool or database
FALLOUT – DNI metadata ingest processor/database
– DNR metadata ingest processor/database
FASCINATOR – Series of Type 1 encryption modules for Motorola digital-capable voice radios
FASHIONCLEFT (FC) – Wrapper used to exfiltrate data of VPN and VoIP communications
FASTBAT – Telephony related database?
FASTFOLLOWER – Tool to identify foreign agents who might tail American case officers overseas by correlating cellphone signals
FASTSCOPE – NSA database
FEEDTROUGH – Software implant for unauthorized access to Juniper firewall models N5XT, NS25, NS50, NS200, NS500, ISG1000
FERRETCANON – Subsystem of the FOXACID system
FINKDIFFERENT (FIDI) – Tool used for exploiting TOR networks
FIRE ANT – Open Source visualisation tool
– NSA key generation scheme, used for exchanging EKMS public keys
FIRETRUCK – SIGINT tool or database
FIREWALK -Bidirectional network implant, passive gigabit ethernet traffic collector and active ethernet packet injector within RJ45 Dual Stacked USB connector, digital core used with HOWLERMONKEY, formerly RADON
– NSA program for securing commercial smartphones
FLARE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
FLATLIQUID – TAO operation against the office of the Mexican president
FLEMING – The embassy of Slovakia in Washington DC
FLINTLOCK – The DICTIONARY computer used at the Waihopai station of ECHELON
FLUXBABBITT – Hardware implant for Dell PowerEdge RAID servers using Xeon processors
FOGGYBOTTOM – Computer implant plug-in that records logs of internet browsing histories and collects login details and passwords used to access websites and email accounts
FOREMAN – Tactical SIGINT database? Used to determine ‘foreigness’
FOURSCORE – (former?) database for fax and internet data
FOXACID (FA?) – System of secret internet servers used to attack target computers
FOXSEARCH – Tool for monitoring a QUANTUM target which involves FOXACID servers
FOXTRAIL – NSA tool or database
FRIARTUCK – VPN Events tool or database (CSEC?)
FREEFLOW-compliant – Supported by TURBULENCE architecture
FREEZEPOST – Something related to NSA’s TAO division
FRONTO – Retired SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
FROSTBURG – Connection Machine 5 (CM-5) supercomputer, used by NSA from 1991-1997
FROTH – Retired SIGINT product codeword
FRUGALSHOT – FOXACID servers for receiving callbacks from computers infected with NSA spying software
G
GALACTICHALO – Remote SATCOM collection facility
GALAXY – Find/fix/finish program of locating signal-emitting devices of targets
GAMMA (G) – Compartment for highly sensitive communication intercepts
GAMUT – NSA collection tasking tool or database
GARLIC – The NSA satellite intercept station at Bad Aibling (Germany)
GATEKEEPER – NSA user account management system
GAVEL – Retired SIGINT product codeword
GECKO II – System consisting of hardware implant MR RF or GSM, UNITEDRAKE software implant, IRONCHEF persistence back door
GEMINI – Remote SATCOM collection facility
GENESIS – Modified GSM handset for covert network surveys, recording of RF spectrum use, and handset geolocation based on software defined radio
GENIE – Overall close-access program, collection by Sigads US-3136 and US-3137
GHOSTMACHINE – NSA’s Special Source Operations cloud analytics platform
GINSU – Provides software persistence for the CNE implant KONGUR having PCI bus hardware implant BULLDOZER on MS desktop PCs
GILGAMESH – Predator-based NSA geolocation system used by JSOC
GISTQEUE (GQ) – NSA software or database
GJALLER – NSA tool or database
GLINT – Retired SIGINT product codeword
GLOBALBROKER – NSA tool or database
GM-PLACE – Database for the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT tool
GODLIKELESION – Modernization program for NSA’s European Technical Center (ETC) in Wiesbaden in 2011
GODSURGE – Runs on FLUXBABBITT circuit board to provide software persistence by exploiting JTAG debugging interface of server processors, requires interdiction and removal of motherboard of JTAG scan chain reconnection
GOPHERSET – Software implant on GMS SIM phase 2+ Toolkit cards that exfiltrates contact list, SMS and call log from handset via SMS to user-defined phone; malware loaded using USB smartcard reader or over-the-air.
GOSSAMER – SIGINT/EW collection and exploitation system
GOTHAM – Processor for external monitor recreating target monitor from red video
GOURMETTROUGH – Configurable implant for Juniper NetScreen firewalls including SSG type, minimal beaconing
GOUT – Subcompartment of GAMMA for intercepts of South Vietnamese government communications
GOVPORT – US government user authentication service
GRAB – SIGINT satellite program
GREY FOX – The 2003 covername of the Mission Support Activity (MSA) of JSOC
GREYSTONE (GST) – CIA’s highly secret rendition and interrogation programs
GROK – Computer implant plug-in used to log keystrokes
GUMFISH – Computer implant plug-in to take over a computer’s webcam and snap photographs
GUPY – Subcompartment of GAMMA for intercepts from Soviet leadership car phones (1960’s-70’s)
H
HALLUXWATER – Software implant as boot ROM upgrade for Huawei Eudemon firewalls, finds patch points in inbound packet processing, used in O2, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom
HAMMERCHANT – Implant for network routers to intercept and perform exploitation attacks against data sent through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and/or phone calls via Skype and other VoIP software
HAMMERMILL – Insertion Tool controls HEADWATER boot ROM backdoor
HAMMERSTEIN – Implant for network routers to intercept and perform exploitation attacks against data sent through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and/or phone calls via Skype and other VoIP software
HAPPYFOOT – Program that intercepts traffic generated by mobile apps that send a smartphone’s location to advertising networks
HARD ASSOCIATION – Second party database
– An IBM supercomputer used by NSA from 1962-1976
HAVE BLUE – Development program of the F-117A Stealth fighter-bomber
HAVE QUICK (HQ) – Frequency-hopping system protecting military UHF radio traffic
HEADWATER – Permanent backdoor in boot ROM for Huawei routers stable to firmware updates, installed over internet, capture and examination of all IP packets passing through host router, controlled by Hammermill Insertion Tool
HEMLOCK – Operation against the Italian embassy in Washington DC using HIGHLANDS techniques
HERCULES – CIA terrorism database
HERETIC – NSA tool or database
HEREYSTITCH – Collaboration program between NSA units T1222 and SSG
HERMOS – Joint venture between the German BND and another country with access for NSA (2012)
HERON – Retired SIGINT product codeword
HIGHCASTLE – Tactical database?
HIGHLANDS – Technique for collection from computer implants
HIGHTIDE – NSA tool or database
HOBGOBLIN – NSA tool or database
HOLLOWPOINT – Software defined radio platform
HOMEBASE – Database which allows analysts to coordinate tasking with DNI mission priorities
HOMEMAKER – Upstream collection site
HOMINGPIGEON – Program to intercept communications from airplane passengers
HOTZONE – ?
HOWLERMONKEY (HM) – Generic radio frequency (RF) transceiver tool used for various applications
HUFF – System like FOXACID?
HYSON – Retired SIGINT product codeword
I
ICEBERG – Major NSA backbone project
ICREACH – Tool that uses telephony metadata
IDITAROD (IDIT) – Compartment of the KLONDIKE control system
INCENSER – A joint NSA-GCHQ high-volume cable tapping operation, part of the WINDSTOP program
INDIA – SIGINT Exchange Designator for New Zealand (retired)
– Satellite intercept station near Khon Khaen, Thailand (1979-ca. 2000)
INTREPID SPEAR – The 2009 covername of the Mission Support Activity (MSA) of JSOC
– Series of ELINT and COMINT spy satellites (since 2009)
IRATEMONK – Hard drive firmware providing software persistence for desktops and laptops via Master Boot Record substitution, for Seagate Maxtor Samsung file systems FAR NRFS EXT3 UFS, payload is implant installer, shown at internet cafe
IRONAVENGER – NSA hacking operation against an ally and an adversary (2010)
IRONCHEF – Provides access persistence back door exploiting BIOS and SMM to communicate with a 2-way RF hardware implant
IRONSAND – Second Party satellite intercept station in New Zealand
ISHTAR – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Japan (retired)
ISLANDTRANSPORT – Internal messaging service, as part of the QUANTUM system
IVORY – Retired SIGINT product codeword
IVY BELLS – NSA, CIA and Navy operation to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication cables
J
JACKKNIFE – The NSA satellite intercept station at Yakima (US)
JACKPOT – Internal NSA process improvement program (early 1990s – early 2000s)
JETPLOW – Persistent firmware back door for Cisco PIX and ASA firewall and routers, modifies OS at boot time
JOLLYROGER – NSA database
JOSEKI-1 – Classified Suite A algorithm
JOURNEYMAN – Major NSA backbone project
JUGGERNAUT – Ingest system for processing signals from (mobile?) phone networks
– Class of SIGINT reconnaissance satellites (1971-1983)
JUNIORMINT – Implant digital core, either mini printed circuit board or ultra-mini Flip Chip Module, contains ARM9 micro-controller, FPGA Flash SDRAM and DDR2 memories
K
KAMPUS – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ? (retired)
KANDIK (KAND) – Compartment of the KLONDIKE control system
KARMA POLICE – Second party database
KATEEL – The Brazilian embassy in Washington
KEA – Asymmetric-key Type 2 algorithm used in products like Fortezza, Fortezza Plus
KEELSON – Internet metadata processing system
KEYCARD – Database for VPN key exchange IP packet addresses
KEYRUT – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ? (retired)
KILTING – ELINT database
KIMBO – Retired SIGINT product codeword
KLIEGLIGHT (KL) – Tactical SIGINT reports
KLONDIKE (KDK) – Control system for sensitive geospatial intelligence
KLONDIKE – The embassy of Greece in Washington DC
KNIGHTHAWK – Probably a military SIGINT tool
– Method for summarizing very large textual data sets
KONGUR – Software implant restorable by GINSU after OS upgrade or reinstall
KRONE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
L
(LAC) – Retired NSA dissemination control marking
LADYLOVE – The NSA satellite intercept station at Misawa, Japan (since 1982)
LANYARD – Reconaissance satellite program
LARUM – Retired SIGINT product codeword
LEGION AMBER – Chinese hacking operation against a major US software company
LEGION JADE – A group of Chinese hackers
LEGION RUBY – A group of Chinese hackers
LEGION YANKEE – Chinese hacking operation against the Pentagon and defense contractors (2011)
LEMONWOOD – NSA satellite intercept station in Thailand
LEXHOUND – Tool for targeting social networking?
LIBERTY – First word of nicknames for collection and analysis programs used by JSOC and other sensitive DOD activities
LIBERTY BLUE – Modified RC-12 Guardrail surveillance airplane used by JSOC’s Mission Support Activity (MSA)
LIFESAVER – Technique which images the hard drive of computers
LIONSHARE – Internal NSA process improvement program (2003-2008)
LITHIUM – Facility to filter and gather data at a major (foreign?) telecommunications company under the BLARNEY program
LODESTONE – NSA’s CRAY-1 supercomputer
LOGGERHEAD – Device to collect contents of analog cell phone calls (made by Harris Corp.)
LOMA – SCI control system for Foreign Instrumentation and Signature Intelligence
LOPERS – Software application for Public Switched Telephone Networks or some kind of hardware
LOUDAUTO – An ANGRYNEIGHBOR radar retro-reflector, microphone captures room audio by pulse position modulation of square wave
M
MACHINESHOP – ?
MADCAPOCELOT – Sub-program of STORMBREW for collection of internet metadata about Russia and European terrorism
MAESTRO-II – Mini digital core implant, standard TAO implant architecture
MAGIC – Codeword for decrypted high-level diplomatic Nazi messages
– A keystroke logging software developed by the FBI
MAGNES – Remote SATCOM collection facility
MAGNETIC – Technique of sensor collection of magnetic emanations
– Series of SIGINT spy satellites (since 1985)
MAGOTHY – The embassy of the European Union in Washington DC
MAILORDER – Data transfer tool (SFTP-based?)
– Federal database of personal and financial data of suspicious US citizens
– NSA database of bulk phone metadata
MANASSAS – Former NSA counter-encryption program, succeeded by BULLRUN
– NSA database of bulk internet metadata
MARKHAM – NSA data system?
MARTES – NSA software tool to prepare reports
MASTERLINK – NSA tasking source
MASTERSHAKE – NSA tool or database
MATRIX – Some kind of data processing system
MAYTAG – Upstream collection site
MEDLEY – Classified Suite A algorithm
MENTOR – Class of SIGINT spy satellites (since 1995)
MERCED – The Bulgarian embassy in Washington DC
MERCURY – Soviet cipher machine partially exploited by NSA in the 1960’s
MERCURY – Remote SATCOM collection facility
MESSIAH – NSA automated message handling system
METAWAVE – Warehouse of unselected internet metadata
METROTUBE – Analytic tool for VPN data
METTLESOME – NSA Collection mission system
MIDAS – Satellite program
MIDDLEMAN – TAO covert network
MILKBONE – Question-Focused Dataset used for text message collection
– A sister project to Project SHAMROCK (1967-1973)
MINERALIZE – Technique for collection through LAN implants
MIRANDA – Some kind of number related to NSA targets
MIRROR – Interface to the ROADBED system
MOCCASIN – A hardware implant, permanently connected to a USB keyboard
MONKEYCALENDAR – Software implant on GMS SIM cards that exfiltrates user geolocation data
MONKEYROCKET – Sub-program of OAKSTAR for collecting internet metadata and content through a foreign access point
MOONLIGHTPATH (EGL?) – SSO collection facility
MOONPENNY – The NSA satellite intercept station at Harrogate (Great Britain)
MORAY – Compartment for the least sensitive COMINT material, retired in 1999
MORPHEUS – Program of the Global Access Operations (GAO)
MOTHMONSTER – NSA tool for exploiting the TOR network
MOVEONYX – Tool related to CASPORT
MULBERRY – The mission of Japan at the United Nations in New York
(JPM?) – Joint NSA-GCHQ operation to tap the cables linking Google and Yahoo data clouds to the internet Part of WINDSTOP
MUSKET – Retired SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
MUSKETEER – NSA’s Special Signal Collection unit
– SSO unilateral voice interception program
– Presidential Global Communications System
N
NASHUA – The mission of India at the United Nations in New York
NAVAJO – The mission of Vietnam at the United Nations in New York
NAVARRO – The embassy of Georgia in Washington DC
NEBULA – Base station router similar to CYCLONE Hx9
NECTAR – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ? (retired)
NELEUS – Remote SATCOM collection facility
NEMESIS – SIGINT satellite
– Operation to kill or capture Osama bin Laden (2011)
NIGHTSTAND – 802.11 wireless packet injection tool that runs on standalone x86 laptop running Linux Fedora Core 3 and exploits windows platforms running Internet Explorer, from 8 miles away
NIGHTWATCH – Portable computer in shielded case for recreating target monitor from progressive-scan non-interlaced VAGRANT signals
NINJANIC – Something related to TURMOIL
NITESURF – NSA tool or database
NITRO – Remote SATCOM collection facility
NOCON – NSA dissemination marking or COI
NONBOOK (NK) – Compartment of the ENDSEAL control system
NORMALRUN – NSA tool or database
NUCLEON – Database for contents of phone calls
NYMROD – Automated name recognition system
O
– Umbrella program to filter and gather information at major telecommunications companies (since 2004)
OCEAN – Optical collection system for raster-based computer screens
OCEANARIUM – Database for SIGINT from NSA and intelligence sharing partners around the world
OCEANFRONT – Part of the communications network for ECHELON
OCEAN SHIELD – NATO anti-piracy operation
OCEANSURF – Engineering hub of the Global Access Operations (GAO)
OCELOT – Actual name: MADCAPOCELOT
OCTAVE – NSA tool for telephone network tasking (succeeded by the UTT?)
OCTSKYWARD – Collection of GSM data from flying aircraft
OILSTOCK – A system for analyzing air warning and surveillance data
– CSEC tool for discovering and identifying telephone and computer connections
OLYMPIC – First word of nicknames for programs involving defense against Chinese cyber-warfare and US offensive cyber-warfare
OLYMPIC GAMES – Joint US and Israel operation against the Iranian nuclear program (aka Stuxnet)
OLYMPUS – Software component of VALIDATOR/SOMBERKNAVE used to communicate via wireless LAN 802.11 hardware
OMNIGAT – Field network component
ONEROOF – Main tactical SIGINT database, with raw and unfiltered intercepts
– Newer units of the LACROSSE reconaissance satellites
ORANGEBLOSSOM – Sub-program of OAKSTAR for collection from an international transit switch (sigad: US-3251)
ORANGECRUSH – Sub-program of OAKSTAR for collecting metadata, voice, fax, phone and internet content through a foreign access point
ORION – SIGINT satellite
ORLANDOCARD – NSA operation thtat attracted visits from 77,413 foreign computers and planted spyware on more than 1,000 by using a ‘honeypot’ computer
OSAGE – The embassy of India in Washington DC
OSCAR – SIGINT Exchange Designator for the USA
OSWAYO – The embassy annex of India in Washington DC
– The Lockheed A-12 program (better known as SR-71)
P
PACKAGEDGOODS – Program which tracks the ‘traceroutes’ through which data flows around the Internet
PACKETSCOPE – Internet cable tapping system
PACKETSWING – NSA tool or database
PACKETWRENCH – Computer exploit delivered by the FERRETCANON system
PADSTONE – Type 1 Cryptographic algorithm used in several crypto products
PAINTEDEAGLE – SI-ECI compartment related to the BULLRUN program
PALANTERRA – A family of spatially and analytically enabled Web-based interfaces used by the NGA
PANGRAM (PM) – Alleged SCI control system
PANTHER – The embassy of Vietnam in Washington DC
PARCHDUSK (PD) – Productions Operation of NSA’s TAO division
PARTNERMALL PROGRAM (PMP) – A single collaboration environment, to be succeeded by the Global Collaboration Environment (GCE)
PARTSHOP – ?
PATHFINDER – SIGINT analysis tool (developed by SAIC)
PATHWAY – NSA’s former main computer communications network
– Call chaining analysis tool (developed by i2)
PAWLEYS – SI-ECI compartment related to the BULLRUN program
PEARL – Retired SIGINT product codeword
PEDDLECHEAP – Computer exploit delivered by the FERRETCANON system
PENDLETON – SI-ECI compartment related to the BULLRUN program
PEPPERBOX – Tool or database for targeting Requests (CSEC?)
PERDIDO – The mission of the European Union at the United Nations in New York
PERFECTMOON – An out-sites covering system
PHOTOANGLO – A continuous wave generator and receiver. The bugs on the other end are ANGRYNEIGHBOR class
PIEDMONT – SI-ECI compartment related to the BULLRUN program
PICARESQUE (PIQ) – SI-ECI compartment related to the BULLRUN program
PICASSO – Modified GSM handset that collects user data plus room audio
PINUP – Retired SIGINT product codeword
– Database for recorded signals intercepts/internet content
PITCHFORD – SI-ECI compartment related to the BULLRUN program
PIVOT – Retired SIGINT product codeword
PIXIE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
PLATFORM – Computer system linking the ECHELON intercept sites
PLUS – NSA SIGINT production feedback program
POCOMOKE – The Brazilian Permanent Mission to the UN in New York
POISON NUT – CES VPN attack orchestrator
POLARBREEZE – NSA technique to tap into nearby computers
POPPY – SIGINT satellite program
POPTOP – Collection system for telephony data
POWELL – The Greek mission at the United Nations in New York
PREFER – System for identifying and extracting text messages (SMS) from the DISHFIRE database
PRESSUREPORT – Software interface related to PRESSUREWAVE
PRESSUREWAVE – NSA cloud database for VPN and VoIP content and metadata
PRIMECANE – American high-tech company cooperating in providing a network access point for the ORANGECRUSH program
– Program for collecting foreign internet data from US internet companies
PROFORMA – Intelligence derived from computer-based data
– Mobile tactical SIGINT collection system
PROTEIN – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
PROTON – SIGINT database for time-sensitive targets/counterintelligence
PROTOSS – Local computer handling radio frequency signals from implants
PURPLE – Codename for a Japanese diplomatic cryptosystem during WWII
– US military OPSEC program (since 1966)
PUTTY – NSA tool or database
PUZZLECUBE – NSA tool or database
PYLON – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
Q
QUADRANT – A crypto implementation code
QUADRESPECTRE PRIME – ?
– A consolidated QUANTUMTHEORY platform to reduce latencies by co-locating passive sensors with local decisioning and traffic injection (under development in 2011)
– Secret servers placed by NSA at key places on the internet backbone; part of the TURMOIL program
QUANTUMBISCUIT – Enhancement of QUANTUMINSERT for targets which are behind large proxies
QUANTUMBOT – Method for taking control of idle IRC bots and botnets)
QUANTUMBOT2 – Combination of Q-BOT and Q-BISCUIT for webbased botnets
QUANTUMCOOKIE – Method to force cookies onto target computers
QUANTUMCOPPER – Method for corrupting file uploads and downloads
QUANTUMDNS – DNS injection/redirection based off of A record queries
QUANTUMHAND – Man-on-the-side technique using a fake Facebook server
QUANTUMINSERT (QI) – Man-on-the-side technique that redirects target internet traffic to a FOXACID server for exploitation
QUANTUMMUSH – Targeted spam exploitation method
QUANTUMNATION – Umbrella for COMMONDEER and VALIDATOR computer exploits
QUANTUMPHANTOM – Hijacks any IP address to use as covert infrastructure
QUANTUMSKY – Malware used to block targets from accessing certain websites through RST packet spoofing
QUANTUMSMACKDOWN – Method for using packet injection to block attacks against DoD computers
QUANTUMSPIN – Exploitation method for instant messaging
QUANTUMSQUEEL – Method for injecting MySQL persistant database connections
QUANTUMSQUIRREL – Using any IP address as a covert infrastructure
QUANTUMTHEORY (QT) – Computer hacking toolbox used by NSA’s TAO division, which dynamically injects packets into target’s network session
QUANTUM LEAP – CIA tool to “find non-obvious linkages, new connections, and new information” from within a dataset
QUARTERPOUNDER – Upstream collection site
– Relay satellite for reconaissance satellites
QUEENSLAND – Upstream collection site
R
RADIOSPRING – ?
RADON – Host tap that can inject Ethernet packets
RAGEMASTER – Part of ANGRYNEIGHBOR radar retro-reflectors, for red video graphics array cable in ferrite bead RFI chokers between video card and monitor, target for RF flooding and collection of VAGRANT video signal
(RGT) – ECI compartment for call and e-mail content collected under FISA authority
RAILHEAD – NCTC database project
RAISIN – NSA database or tool
RAMPART – NSA operational branches that intercept heads of state and their closest aides. Known divisions are RAMPART-A, RAMPART-I and RAMPART-T. Also mentioned as a suite of programs for assuring system functionality
RAVEN – SIGINT satellite
REACTOR – Tool or program related to MARINA?
REBA – Major NSA backbone project
REDHAWK – NSA tool
REDROOF – NSA tool
REMATION – Joint NSA-GCHQ counter-TOR workshop
RENOIR – NSA telephone network visualization tool
REQUETTE – A Taiwanese TECO in New York
RESERVE (RSV) – Control system for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
RESERVEVISION – Remote monitoring tool
RESOLUTETITAN – Internet cable access program?
RETRO – see RETROSPECTIVE
RETROSPECTIVE – 30-day retrospective retrieval tool for SCALAWAG
RETURNSPRING – High-side server shown in UNITEDRAKE internet cafe monitoring graphic
RHINEHEART – NSA tool or database
– Class of SIGINT spy satellites (in 1975 changed to AQUACADE)
RICHTER – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Germany
RIPCORD – ?
RIVET JOINT – Reconaissance operation
ROADBED – Probably a military SIGINT database
ROCKYKNOB – Optional DSP when using Data Over Voice transmission in CROSSBEAM
RONIN – NSA tool for detecting TOR-node IP-addresses
RORIPA – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
ROYALNET – Internet exploitation tool
RUFF – Compartment of TALENT KEYHOLE for IMINT satellites
RUMBUCKET – Analytic tool
RUTLEY – Network of SIGINT satellites launched in 1994 and 1995
S
SABRE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
SALEM – ?
SALVAGERABBIT – Computer implant plug-in that exfiltrates data from removable flash drives that connect to an infected computer
SAMOS – Reconnaissance satellite program
SAPPY – Retired SIGINT product codeword
SARATOGA – SSO access facility (since 2011)
SARDINE – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Sweden
– Narrow band voice encryption for radio and telephone communication
SAVIN – Retired SIGINT product codeword
SCALAWAG – Collection facility under the MYSTIC program
SCALLION – Upstream collection site
SCAPEL – Second Party satellite intercept station in Nairobi, Kenia
SCHOOLMONTANA – Software implant for Juniper J-series routers used to direct traffic between server, desktop computers, corporate network and internet
SCIMITAR – A tool to create contact graphs?
SCISSORS – System used for separating different types of data and protocols
SCORPIOFORE – SIGINT reporting tool
SEABOOT – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
SEADIVER – Collection system for telephony data
SEAGULLFARO – High-side server shown in UNITEDRAKE internet cafe monitoring graphic
SEARCHLITE – Tactical SIGINT collecting system for like cell phone calls
SEASONEDMOTH (SMOTH) – Stage0 computer implant which dies after 30 days, deployed by the QUANTUMNATION method
SECONDDATE – Method to influence real-time communications between client and server in order to redirect web-browsers to FOXACID malware servers
SECUREINSIGHT – A software framework to support high-volume analytics
SEMESTER – NSA SIGINT reporting tool
– Transportable suite of ISR equipment (since 1991)
– Radome on top of the U2 to relay SIGINT data to ground stations
SENTINEL – NSA database security filter
SERENADE – SSO corporate partner (foreign?)
SERUM – Bank of servers within ROC managing approvals and ticket system
SETTEE – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
– Operation for intercepting telegraphic data going in or out the US (1945-1975)
SHAREDVISION – Mission program at Menwith Hill satellite station
SHARKFIN – Sweeps up all-source communications intelligence at high speed and volumes
SHARPFOCUS (SF2) – Productions Operation of NSA’s TAO division
SHELLTRUMPET – NSA metadata processing program (since December 2007)
SHENANIGANS – Aircraft-based NSA geolocation system used by CIA
SHIFTINGSHADOW – Sub-program of OAKSTAR for collecting telephone metadata and voice content from Afghanistan through a foreign access point
SHILLELAGH – Classified Suite A algorithm
SHORTSHEET – NSA tool for Computer Network Exploitation
SHOTGIANT – NSA operation for hacking and monitoring the Huawei network (since 2009)
SIERRAMONTANA – Software implant for Juniper M-series routers used by enterprises and service providers
SIGINT NAVIGATOR – NSA database
SIGSALY – The first secure voice system from World War II
SILKWORTH – A software program used for the ECHELON system
SILLYBUNNY – Some kind of webbrowser tag which can be used as selector
SILVER – Soviet cipher machine partially exploited by NSA in the 1960’s
SILVERCOMET – SIGINT satellites?
SILVERZEPHYR (SZ) – Sub-program of OAKSTAR for collecting phone and internet metadata and content from Latin and South America through an international transit switch
SIRE – A software program used for the ECHELON system(?)
– Type 2 Block cipher algorithms used in various crypto products
SKOPE – SIGINT analytical toolkit
SKYSCRAPER – Interface to the ROADBED system
SKYWRITER – NSA tool to prepare (internet) intelligence reports
SLICKERVICAR – Used with UNITEDRAKE or STRAITBIZARRE to upload hard drive firmware to implant IRATEMONK
SLINGSHOT – End Product Reports (CSEC?)
SMOKEYSINK – SSO access facility (since 2011?)
SNICK – 2nd Party satellite intercept station in Oman
SNORT – Repository of computer network attack techniques/coding
SOAPOPERA – (former?) database for voice, end product and SRI information
SOMBERKNAVE – Windows XP wireless software implant providing covert internet connectivity, routing TCP traffic via an unused 802.11 network device allowing OLYMPUS or VALIDATOR to call home from air-gapped computer
SORTING HAT – ?
SORTING LEAD – ?
SOUFFLETROUGH – Software implant in BIOS Juniper SSG300 and SSG500 devices, permanent backdoor, modifies ScreenOS at boot, utilizes Intel’s System Management Mode
SOUNDER – Second Party satellite intercept station at Cyprus
SPARKLEPONY – Tool or program related to MARINA
SPARROW II – Airborne wireless network detector running BLINDDATE tools via 802.11
SPECTRE – SCI control system for intelligence on terrorist activities
SPECULATION – Protocol for over-the-air communication between COTTONMOUTH computer implant devices, compatible with HOWLERMONKEY
SPHINX – Counterintelligence database of the Defense Intelligence Agency
SPINNERET (SPN) – SSO collection facility
SPLITGLASS – NSA analytical database
SPLUNK – Tool used for SIGINT Development
SPOKE – Compartment for less sensitive COMINT material, retired in 1999
SPOTBEAM – ?
SPORTCOAST – Upstream collection site
SPRIG – Retired SIGINT product codeword
SPRINGRAY – Some kind of internal notification system
SPYDER – Analytic tool for selected content of text messages from the DISHFIRE database
STARBURST – The initial code word for the STELLARWIND compartment
STARLIGHT – Analyst tool
STARPROC – User lead that can be uses as a selector
STARSEARCH – Target Knowledge tool or database (CSEC?)
STATEROOM – Covert SIGINT collection sites based in US diplomatic facilities
STEELFLAUTA – SSO Corporate/TAO Shaping program
STEELKNIGHT – (foreign?) partner providing a network access point for the SILVERZEPHYR program
STEELWINTER – A supercomputer acquired by the Norwegian military intelligence agency
STELLAR – Second Party satellite intercept station at Geraldton, Australia
STELLARWIND (STLW) – SCI compartment for the President’s Surveillance Program information
STEPHANIE – Covert listening post in the Canadian embassy in Moscow (est. 1972)
STINGRAY – Device for tracking the location of cell phones (made by Harris Corp.) STONEGHOST – DIA network for information exchange with UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (TS/SCI)
STORMBREW – Program for collection from an international transit switches and cables (since 2001)
STRAIGHTBIZARRE – Software implant used to communicate through covert channels
STRATOS – Tool or databse for GPRS Events (CSEC?)
STRAWHAT – NSA datalinks between field sites and processing centers (1969-?)
STRONGMITE – Computer at remote operations center used for long range communications
STRUM – (see abbreviations)
STUCCOMONTANA – Software implant for Juniper T-Series routers used in large fixed-line, mobile, video, and cloud networks, otherwise just like SCHOOLMONTANA
STUMPCURSOR – Foreign computer accessing program of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations
SUBSTRATUM – Upstream collection site
SUEDE – Retired SIGINT product codeword
SULPHUR – The mission of South Korea at the United Nations in New York
SUNSCREEN – Tool or database
SURFBOARD – NSA tool or database
SURLEYSPAWN – Data RF retro-reflector, gathers keystrokes FSK frequency shift keyed radar retro-reflector, USB or IBM keyboards
SURPLUSHANGAR – High to low diode, part of the QUANTUM system
SURREY – Main NSA requirements database, where tasking instructions are stored and validated, used by the FORNSAT, SSO and TAO divisions
SUTURESAILOR – Printed circuit board digital core used with HOWLERMONKEY
SWAMP – NSA data system?
SWAP – Implanted software persistence by exploiting motherboard BIOS and hard drive Host Protected Area for execution before OS loads, operative on windows linux, freeBSD Solaris
– NSA data model for analyzing target connections
T
TACOSUAVE – ?
TALENT KEYHOLE (TK) – Control system for space-based collection platforms
TALK QUICK – An interim secure voice system created to satisfy urgent requirements imposed by conditions to Southeast Asia. Function was absorbed by AUTOSEVOCOM
TAPERLAY – Covername for Global Numbering Data Base (GNDB), used for looking up the registered location of a mobile device
TARMAC – Improvement program at Menwith Hill satellite station
TAROTCARD – NSA tool or database
TAWDRYYARD – Beacon radio frequency radar retro-reflector used to positionally locate deployed RAGEMASTER units
TEMPEST – Investigations and studies of compromising electronic emanations
– GCHQ program for intercepting internet and telephone traffic
THESPIS – SIGINT Exchange Designator for ?
THINTREAD – NSA program for wiretapping and sophisticated analysis of the resulting data
THUMB – Retired SIGINT product codeword
THUNDERCLOUD – Collaboration program between NSA units T1222 and SSG
TIAMAT – Joint venture between the German BND and another country with access for NSA
TICKETWINDOW – System that makes SSO collection available to 2nd Party partners
TIDALSURGE – Router Configurations tool (CSEC?)
TIDEWAY – Part of the communications network for ECHELON
TIMBERLINE – The NSA satellite intercept station at Sugar Grove (US)
TINMAN – Database related to air warning and surveillance
TITAN POINTE – Upstream collection site
– Presumably Chinese attacks on American computer systems (since 2003)
TITLEHOLDER – NSA tool
TOPAZ – Satellite program
TOTECHASER – Software implant in flash ROM windows CE for Thuraya 2520 satellite/GSM/web/email/MMS/GPS
TOTEGHOSTLY – Modular implant for windows mobile OS based on SB using CP framework, Freeflow-compliant so supported by TURBULENCE architecture
TOWERPOWER – NSA tool or database
TOXICARE – NSA tool
TOYGRIPPE – NSA’s CES database for VPN metadata
TRACFIN – NSA database for financial data like credit card purchases
TRAFFICTHIEF – Part of the TURBULENCE and the PRISM programs
TRAILBLAZER – NSA Program to analyze data carried on communications networks
TRAILMAPPER – NSA tool or database
TRANSX – NSA database
TREACLEBETA – TAO hacking against the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba
TREASUREMAP – NSA internet traffic visualization tool
TRIGGERFISH – Device to collect the content of digital cell phone calls (made by Harris Corp.)
TRINE – Predecessor of the UMBRA compartment for COMINT
TRINITY – Implant digital core concealed in COTTONMOUTH-I, providing ARM9 microcontroller, FPGA Flash and SDRAM memories
TRITON – Tool or database for TOR Nodes (CSEC?)
– Series of ELINT reconnaissance satellites (1994-2008)
TRYST – Covert listening post in the British embassy in Moscow
TUBE – Database for selected internet content?
TUMULT – Part of the TURBULENCE program
TUNINGFORK – Sustained collection linked to SEAGULLFARO, previously NSA database or tool for protocol exploitation
TURBINE – Active SIGINT: centralized automated command/control system for managing a large network of active computer implants for intelligence gathering (since 2010)
TURBOPANDA – The Turbopanda Insertion Tool allows read/write to memory, execute an address or packet; joint NSA/CIA project on Huawei network equipment
TURBULENCE (TU) – Integrate NSA architecture with several layers and sub-programs to detect threats in cyberspace (since 2005)
TURMOIL – Passive SIGINT sensors: high speed collection of foreign target satellite, microwave and cable communications, part of the TURBULENCE program Maybe for selecting common internet encryption technologies to exploit.
TURTLEPOWER -NSA tool
TUSKATTIRE – Ingest system for cleaning and processing DNR (telephony) data
TUTELAGE – Active defense system to monitor network traffic in order to detect malicious code and network attacks, part of the TURBULENCE program
TWEED – Retired SIGINT product codeword
TWISTEDKILT – Writes to Host Protected area on hard drive to implant Swap and its implant installer payload
TWISTEDPATH – NSA tool or database
TYPHON HX – GSM base station router network in box for tactical Sigint geolocating and capturing user
U
ULTRA – Decrypted high-level military Nazi messages, like from the Enigma machine
UMBRA – Retired compartment for the most sensitive COMINT material
UNIFORM – SIGINT Exchange Designator for Canada
UNITEDRAKE – Computer exploit delivered by the FERRETCANON system
USHER – Retired SIGINT product codeword
V
VAGRANT – Radar retro-reflector technique on video cable to reproduce open computer screens
VALIDATOR – Computer exploit delivered by the FERRETCANON system for looking whether a computer has security software, runs as user process on target OS, modified for SCHOOLMONTANA, initiates a call home, passes to SOMBERKNAVE, downloads OLYMPUS and communicates with remote operation center
– Decrypted intercepts of messages from Soviet intelligence agencies
VERDANT (VER) – Alleged SCI control system
VESUVIUS – Prototype quantum computer, situated in NSA’s Utah Data Center
VICTORYDANCE – Joint NSA-CIA operation to map WiFi fingerprints of nearly every major town in Yemen
VIEWPLATE – Processor for external monitor recreating target monitor from red video
VINTAGE HARVEST – Probably a military SIGINT tool
VITALAIR – NSA tool
VOICESAIL – Intelligence database
– Class of SIGINT spy satellites (1978-1989)
VOXGLO – Multiple award contract providing cyber security and enterprise computing, software development, and systems integration support
W
WABASH – The embassy of France in Washington DC
WAGONBED – Hardware GSM controller board implant on CrossBeam or HP Proliant G5 server that communicates over I2C interface
WALBURN – High-speed link encryption, used in various encryption products
WARPDRIVE – Joint venture between the German BND and another country with access for NSA (2013)
WATERWITCH – Hand-held tool for geolocating targeted handsets to last mile
WAVELEGAL – Authorization service that logs data queries
WEALTHYCLUSTER – Program to hunt down tips on terrorists in cyberspace (2002- )
WEASEL – Type 1 Cryptographic algorithm used in SafeXcel-3340
WEBCANDID – NSA tool or database
WESTPORT – The mission of Venezuela at the United Nations in New York
WILLOWVIXEN – Method to deploy malware by sending out spam emails that trick targets into clicking a malicious link
WISTFULTOLL – Plug-in for UNITEDRAKE and STRAITBIZARRE used to harvest target forensics via Windows Management Instrumentation and Registry extractions, can be done through USB thumb drive
WHIPGENIE (WPG) – ECI compartment for details about the STELLARWIND program
WHITEBOX – Program for intercepting the public switched telephone network?
WHITELIST – NSA tool
WHITETAMALE – Operation for collecting e-mails from Mexico’s Public Security Secretariat
WINDCHASER – Tool or program related to MARINA
WINDSORBLUE – Supercomputer program at IBM
WINDSTOP – Joint NSA-GCHQ unilateral high-volume cable tapping program
WINTERLIGHT – A QUANTUM computer hacking program in which Sweden takes part
WIRESHARK – Database with malicious network signatures
WITCH – Retired SIGINT product codeword
WITCHHUNT – ?
WOLFPOINT – SSO corporate partner under the STORMBREW program
WORDGOPHER – Platform to enable demodulation of low-rate communication carriers
WRANGLER – Database or system which focuses on Electronic Intelligence
X
– Program for finding key words in foreign language documents
XKEYSCORE (XKS) – Program for analysing SIGINT traffic
Y
YACHTSHOP – Sub-program of OAKSTAR for collecting internet metadata
YELLOWPIN – Printed circuit board digital core used with HOWLERMONKEY
YELLOWSTONE – NSA analytical database
YUKON – The embassy of Venezuela in Washington DC
Z
ZAP – (former?) database for texts
ZARF – Compartment of TALENT KEYHOLE for ELINT satellites, retired in 1999
ZESTYLEAK – Software implant that allows remote JETPLOW firmware installation, used by NSA’s CES unit
No matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantage is to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades. – Dr. Gordon J.F. MacDonald 1968
In order to increase functionality and effectiveness, ionospheric heaters are used in combination.Peter A. Kirby, Contributor Activist Post
Located on an United States Air Force site near Gakona, Alaska, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP) is the world’s largest and most functional ionospheric heater. Construction began in 1993. Today, HAARP can generate super high powered beams of directed energy. HAARP is designed to shoot these energy beams 200 kilometers up into the sky; affecting an area known as earth’s ionosphere. In doing this, HAARP can perform a number of functions.
The known uses of HAARP are: weather modification, power beaming, earth tomography (mapping of our planet’s interior), Star Wars-type defense capabilities, enhanced communications, communication disruptions and mind control. For an in-depth discussion about what HAARP does and how it does it, you must read the 1995 book Angels Don’t Play this HAARP by Dr. Nick Begich and journalist Jeane Manning. You can freely access a searchable .pdf here: http://freedomfchs.com/adpthaarp.pdf
Although lesser ionospheric heaters do not generate energy beams as powerful or possess the same functionality as HAARP, similar facilities are located around the world. Along with a smaller facility located near Fairbanks, Alaska, other ionospheric heater locations include: Puerto Rico, Norway, Russia, Tajikistan, Peru and the Middle East. The latest word is that Russia, China and the United States have set up HAARP-like facilities in Antarctica. (Source)
The HAARP website explains the differences between HAARP and other ionospheric heaters like this, “HAARP is unique to most existing facilities due to the combination of a research tool which provides electronic beam steering, wide frequency coverage and high effective radiated power collocated with a diverse suite of scientific observational instruments.” HAARP can be remotely operated. HAARP employs technology originally envisioned and demonstrated by American inventor Nikola Tesla.
HAARP is jointly managed by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in conjunction with the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Here’s more from the HAARP website:
Technical expertise and procurement services as required for the management, administration and evaluation of the program are being provided cooperatively by the Air Force (Air Force Research Laboratory), the Navy (Office of Naval Research and Naval Research Laboratory), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Since the HAARP facility consists of many individual items of scientific equipment, both large and small, there is a considerable list of commercial, academic and government organizations which are contributing to the building of the facility by developing scientific diagnostic instrumentation and by providing guidance in the specification, design and development of the IRI [HAARP]. BAE Advanced Technologies (BAEAT) is the prime contractor for the design and construction of the IRI. Other organizations which have contributed to the program include the University of Alaska, Stanford University, Cornell University, University of Massachusetts, UCLA, MIT, Dartmouth University, Clemson University, Penn State University, University of Tulsa, University of Maryland, SRI International, Northwest Research Associates, Inc., and Geospace, Inc.
The HAARP website notes that, “…major construction at the facility was completed during 2007.”
12 U.S. patents are commonly recognized as applicable. A man named Dr. Bernard Eastlund is listed as the inventor on two of these patents and a co-inventor on another. Dr. Eastlund is commonly acknowledged as the inventor of HAARP.
The 12 HAARP patents were all assigned to ARCO Power Technologies Incorporated (APTI); a subsidiary of Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO). APTI also won the initial contract to build HAARP. In 1994, APTI was sold to a company called E-Systems. E-Systems then changed APTI’s name to Advanced Power Technologies Incorporated. Largely involved in communications and information systems, E-Systems gets most of its business from and has extensive ties to the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1995, Raytheon acquired E-Systems. Raytheon, the defense contracting behemoth, now holds all 12 HAARP patents.
Weather Modification
As far back as 1958, the chief White House advisor on weather modification, Captain Howard T. Orville, said the U.S. defense department was studying “ways to manipulate the charges of the earth and sky and so affect the weather” by using an electronic beam to ionize or de-ionize the atmosphere over a given area.The seminal 1996 Air Force report ‘Owning the Weather 2025’ outlines a weather modification program utilizing ground based support such as HAARP.Let us reference a passage from Nick Begich and Jeane Manning’s book Angels Don’t Play this HAARP:
Eastlund’s enthusiasm for planetary-scale engineering came through just as clearly in an interview with Omni Magazine. While acknowledging that many of the uses of his invention are warlike, he also talked about ‘more benign’ uses. His view of benign included using the technology to reroute the high-altitude jet stream, which is a major player in shaping global weather. Another way to control the weather with his technology would be to build ‘plumes of atmospheric particles to act as a lens or focusing device’ for sunlight, he told Omni. With this, the people controlling the antennae could aim in such a way that the return beams would hit a certain part of the earth. With the heating ability, they could experiment until they could control wind patterns in a specific place.
The Omni article explained. ‘What this means, he says, is that by controlling local weather patterns one could, say, bring rain to Ethiopia or alter the summer storm pattern in the Caribbean.’
United States patent #4,686,605 ‘Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere and/or Magnetosphere’ is one of the 12 HAARP patents. Dr. Eastlund is credited as the inventor. It states, “Weather modification is possible by, for example, altering upper atmosphere wind patterns or altering solar absorption patterns by constructing one or more plumes of atmospheric particles which will act as a lens or focusing device.”I know that quote on the surface looks like a connection between HAARP and chemtrails, but, before we think we have the smoking gun, realize that they are probably talking about particles precipitated from the ionosphere forming a lens without the need of chemtrails; as outlined elsewhere in the patent. The good news is, the patent goes on:
Also as alluded to earlier, molecular modifications of the atmosphere can take place so that positive environmental effects can be achieved. Besides actually changing the molecular composition of an atmospheric region, a particular molecule or molecules can be chosen for increased presence. For example, ozone, nitrogen, etc. concentrations in the atmosphere could be artificially increased. Similarly, environmental enhancement could be achieved by causing the breakup of various chemical entities such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, and the like. Transportation of entities can also be realized when advantage is taken of the drag effects caused by regions of the atmosphere moving up along diverging field lines. Small micron sized particles can be then transported, and, under certain circumstances and with the availability of sufficient energy, larger particles or objects could be similarly affected.
That, my friends is a smoking gun. They are talking about introducing small particles into the atmosphere and then using HAARP to move them and the matter around them for the purpose of weather modification.
HAARP can be used in conjunction with chemtrails in order to modify the weather. Disbursed metallic particles such as aluminum, barium and strontium (the main chemtrail ingredients) may increase the atmosphere’s conductivity and therefore enhance HAARP’s weather modification performance.
A grand history of releasing stuff into the atmosphere as part of scientific research exists.
In the early 1960s our U.S. military dumped 350,000 2-4cm copper needles into the ionosphere attempting to create a ‘telecommunications shield.’
The HAARP executive summary says:
DOD [Department of Defense] agencies already have on-going efforts in the broad area of active ionospheric experiments, including ionospheric enhancements. These include both space and ground based approaches. The space-based efforts include chemical releases (e.g., the Air Force’s Brazilian Ionospheric Modification Experiment, BIME; the Navy’s RED AIR program; and multi-agency participation in the Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite, CERES).
Patent #4,686,605’s description states, “It has also been proposed to release large clouds of barium in the magnetosphere so that photoionization will increase the cold plasma density, thereby producing electron precipitation through enhanced whistler-mode interaction.” Barium is the second most common chemtrail ingredient.
These chemical releases are not all necessarily chemtrails, but they show our military’s extensive atmospheric chemical release activities involving ground and space based monitoring and support.
Lastly, let us refer again to Angels Don’t Play this HAARP:
…there is a super-powerful electrical connection between the ionosphere and the part of the atmosphere where our weather comes onstage, the lower atmosphere. Furthermore, scientific theories describe how the electrical energetic levels of the atmosphere are connected to cloud processes.
Chemtrails may enhance this connection between the lower and upper atmosphere. Then, when HAARP manipulates the ionosphere, the lower areas of the atmosphere (where our weather happens) can be manipulated accordingly.
Power Beaming
United States patent #5,068,669 titled ‘Power Beaming System’ outlines the technical details of how to remotely power airplanes.
Let us refer to a passage from ‘Angels Don’t Play this HAARP.’ Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning reference an ‘Aviation Week’ article:
This ‘Star Wars’ technology developed by ARCO Power Technologies, Incorporated [patent #5,068,669’s assignee] was used in a microwaved-powered aircraft. The aircraft was reported to be able to stay aloft for up to 10,000 hours at 80,000 foot altitudes in a single mission. This craft was envisioned as a surveillance platform. The craft had no need for refueling because the energy was beamed to it and then converted to electrical energy for use by the aircraft. Flight tests were undertaken at Tyendinga Airport near Kingston, Ontario, Canada in the early 1990’s. This test by APTI most likely involved this patent…
If HAARP is powering the chemtrail airplanes, this would be a great logistical advantage as the planes would not need to be grounded for fueling. The airplanes would probably only need to be grounded for payload and maintenance and therefore could remain in the sky, performing their functions without interruption for long periods of time. This would also be an advantage because the more time these planes spend in the air, the less chance there is of the program being exposed. It’s incredibly difficult (as this author has learned) to expose something going on at 40,000 ft. in the sky. The power beaming need not be constant as the airplanes could utilize capacitors.
Little HAARPs
It is reported that smaller, mobile versions of HAARP exist.
Let us refer again to Angels Don’t Play this HAARP:
Is it possible that the HAARP scientists could have miniaturized the technology so that they don’t need such a large area of land and electrical power as called for in Eastlund’s pattents? Manning asked him.
“It’s entirely possible,” he [Eastlund] replied. “They have had a lot of good engineers working on it for some time. I would hope they have improved it.”
Aviation Week reports in 2008 that the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing an airborne version of HAARP. BAE Systems, the article tells us, is to demonstrate this unit by towing it, ‘behind a helicopter.’
Here is a picture of what is described as a mobile HAARP ship:
It has been speculated that this HAARP ship was used to trigger the March 2011 magnitude 9.0 Japan earthquake.
There may be many HAAARP-like facilities of which we are not aware. There may be HAARP-like technology all around us! As noted earlier, ionospheric heaters such as HAARP are used in combination to increase capabilities and effectiveness.
A little HAARP atop the Rocky Mountains at North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) might work well. This is also the location from which I speculate the airplanes are commanded.
A Pattern of Deception
When it comes to HAARP, our government has shown a pattern of denial and obfuscation. In many instances, the HAARP website and the military contradict each other and/or the authors of ‘Angels Don’t Play this HAARP.’
The HAARP website claims that HAARP is not used for weather modification and the military has never admitted to these capabilities. The patents, Nick Begich, Jeane Manning and the European parliament say HAARP can modify the weather.
Although the HAARP website claims experiments are only being carried out in a relatively small portion of the ionosphere directly over the facility, the HAARP executive summary says, “For broader military applications, the potential for significantly altering regions of the ionosphere at relatively great distances (1000 km or more) from a [ionospheric] heater is very desirable.”
The HAARP website claims that HAARP does not make holes in the ionosphere. The European parliament and the authors of Angels Don’t Play this HAARP say it does.
The HAARP website and the military deny that HAARP is a ‘Star Wars’ defense type weapon. The European parliament and the authors of Angels Don’t Play this HAARP insist it is; the patents support their position. Angels says:
In February, 1995, the Star Wars missile defense shield was supposed to be dead. The United States House of Representatives by a 218 to 212 voted to kill the program. Yet HAARP continues on while the motives of the military are hidden from the world.
The military and the HAARP website both claim that HAARP is not a classified project, but leaked documents show that the military planners intend to keep the program under wraps.
The HAARP website contradicts itself about military involvement. In their self-description, they say they are a military project, but in the FAQs, they say HAARP is, “not designed to be an operational system for military purposes.” All this while the military’s executive summary says HAARP is to ‘exploit’ ionospheric processes for Department of Defense purposes.
Dr. Eastlund has contradicted the official military position many times. Even though they have been exhaustively proven, our military denies connections between Eastlund, APTI and HAARP. Eastlund himself said in a 1988 NPR interview that the military had tested some of the ideas presented in the patents. According to Dr. Begich and Jeane Manning:
Eastlund said in a 1988 radio interview that the defense department had done a lot of work on his concepts, but he was not at liberty to give details. He later told Manning that after he had worked within ARCO for a year and applied for patents, Defense Advanced Research Project agency (DARPA) had combed through his theories then gave out a contract for him to study how to generate the relativistic (light speed) electrons in the ionosphere.
Here’s more about Eastlund from Angels:
Eastlund told Chadwick of National Public Radio that the patent should have been kept under government secrecy. He said he had been unhappy that it was issued publicly, but, as he understood it, the patent office does not keep basic ‘fundamental information’ secret. ‘You don’t get a patent if you don’t describe in enough detail to another person how to use it,’ he said. Specifics of military applications of his patent remain proprietary (secret), he added.
I guess it’s just a matter of who you trust. I choose to trust the patents, Nick Begich and Jeane Manning because, about HAARP, the government has been caught lying. To my knowledge, the authors of ‘Angels Don’t Play this HAARP’ have not once yet been found to be lying. The patents speak for themselves.
Conclusions
Even the technocratic European parliament found serious concerns about HAARP. A 1999 European parliament committee report, after hearing Dr. Nick Begich and others, concluded:
[the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Protection] Regards the US military ionospheric manipulation system, HAARP, based in Alaska, which is only a part of the development and deployment of electromagnetic weaponry for both external and internal security use, as an example of the most serious emerging military threat to the global environment and human health, as it seeks to interfere with the highly sensitive and energetic section of the biosphere for military purposes, while all of its consequences are not clear, and calls on the Commission, Council and the Member States to press the US Government, Russia and any other state involved in such activities to cease them, leading to a global convention against such weaponry;
I speculate that HAARP, when and if used for nefarious purposes (such as weather modification in co-operation with chemtrails), is remotely operated from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and/or Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. During my humble investigation, I found that these three locations have produced much of the leading research and development. HAARP is an incredibly high-tech machine. You need highly skilled scientists and engineers to run the thing. The best place to run HAARP would be from a laboratory where the technology was developed. Also, most people (top scientists included) are generally not so hot about relocating to the wilds of Alaska. As noted earlier, HAARP can be remotely operated.
We know HAARP can modify the weather. If one could, don’t you think they would? Weather control is god-like power. Chemtrails may be sprayed to enhance the effectiveness of these operations. If this is the case, our government’s pattern of lying and obfuscation about HAARP makes perfect sense and is consistent with behavior exhibited by others associated with every aspect of chemtrails, geoengineering and the related activities I outline.
Notes:
– Unless Peace Comes book edited by Nigel Calder, Viking Press 1968
– Angels Don’t Play this HAARP book by Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning, Earthpulse Press 1995
-United States patent #4,686,605 ‘Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere and/or Magnetosphere’ assigned to ARCO Power Technologies Incorporated 1987
-United States patent #5,068,669 ‘Power Beaming System’ assigned to ARCO Power Technologies Incorporated 1991
-‘HAARP HF Active Auroral Research Program: Joint Services Program Plans and Activities’ report by the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory and the Navy Office of Naval Research 1990
-‘Equatorial Ionospheric Irregularities Produced by the Brazilian Ionospheric Modification Experiment (BIME)’ report by J.A. Klobuchar and M.A. Abdu Journal of Geophysical Research vol. 94, no. A3 1989
-‘Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System CERES’ report by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration 1999
-‘DARPA at 50’ Aviation Week Aug. 18, 2008
-European parliament report on the environment, security and foreign policy: Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defense Policy January 14, 1999
-‘Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather 2025’ report by the United States Air Force 1996
-‘Holes in Heaven: HAARP and Advances in Tesla Technology’ video by Paula Randol-Smith Productions and Gallina Projects 1998*
-‘Angels Still Don’t Play this HAARP’ video by Dr. Nick Begich, Earthpulse Press, Swenson Media Group 2006*
Planned obsolescence (OR PROGRAM) is the deliberate reduction of the useful life of products, to ensure frequent repurchases and consumption.
In the past, products were built to last. Then, in early 1920, a group of industrial reached the following conclusion:
“An article that refuses to goes down is a tragedy for the business”, especially in the modern consumer society, which is based on accelerated production cycles, repurchase and disposal.
This documentary combines research work with rare footage, stored under lock and key, on the practice of planned obsolescence by large companies in the world from 1920 to the present day.
The film, spoken in English, French, Spanish and German, travels the world interviewing witnesses who experienced the beginning of this practice, now applied worldwide, which harms consumers, generates mountains of waste and feeds the cemeteries of electronic equipment, which never stop growing.
Director Errol Morris’s ‘The Unknown Unknown’ shows Rumsfeld as unapologetic.
April 5, 2014
So what do we know now that we didn’t after documentarian Errol Morris’s 100-minute Q&A with Donald “I Don’t Do Quagmires” Rumsfeld in “The Unknown Known”? Only that the former U.S. secretary of defense is still a master strategist of evasion, contradiction, misdirection and malapropism.
As a footnote, here’s what we do know to date about that dirty little Iraq War that “Rummy,” the George W. Bush White House and their nincompoop Pentagon neo-cons cooked up and spoon fed to the omnivorous American public: more than 4400 U.S. military deaths and 32,000 wounded, at least 100,000 to as many as 500,000 Iraqi fatalities, millions more displaced, and an estimated price tag of $3 trillion, give or take a few hundred billion.
Yet like most of the questions that Morris tosses—gently—at his subject, any such factual horrors are sidestepped, parried and danced around by a fitfully nimble Rumsfeld. Relaxed, nattily dressed and imperiously self-assured as ever, Morris’ hollow yet overstuffed man does his imitation of “Hogan’s Heroes” Sgt. Schultz (“I know nothing, nothing”) while implausibly denying personal culpability for any stink that blew back from the Iraq War, whether the phony Weapons of Mass Destruction raison d’être, prisoner torture or the fictitious links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.
In his Oscar-winning “The Fog of War,” Morris at least got Lyndon Johnson-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to shoulder some of blame for the Vietnam War quagmire. But Rumsfeld is impishly unapologetic, even as his own words are shot down by Morris’ juxtapositions with TV news footage culled from the run-up and catastrophic letdown to the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent U.S. occupation. Yet it’s clear that Morris’ mission isn’t to catch his subject in a Captain Queeg-style meltdown that would cause Rummy to shout “Good gracious” or “Henny-penny” and storm off the set.
Rather, Morris is chiefly interested in the infernal meta-narrative of how those in the pinnacles of power can delude themselves for so long and so often that—perhaps—they don’t even know what the truth is anymore. This is a man seemingly without an ounce of introspection and one who surely sleeps well at night, confident he did all the right things, from his time as the youngest (44) secretary of defense, during the Gerald Ford presidency, to his Freddy Krueger-like return to the Pentagon as prime architect of the shock-and-awe Iraq and Afghanistan U.S.-led invasions.
Morris goes out of his way to humanize Rumsfeld, including humdrum details of his marriage while tracing his long career as Republican White House insider and go-to warhorse who trumpeted “peace through strength” and other hawkish mantras. We hear Morris’ off-camera questions, but the slippery answers are challenged only indirectly via news footage and period headlines, not by contrary interviews that would offer known arguments to Rumsfeld’s self-serving explanations.
The film’s title is a quote from one of the enormous number of official memos Rumsfeld generated over the decades. In one wacky rumination from 2004 (Subject: What You Know), he writes of the “things that you think you know that it turns out you do not.” For Morris, this is a four-star analogy for his subject, a polarizing public figure who indeed is a riddle wrapped in an enigma—and cloaked in an impenetrable armor of Orwellian double-talk. As running metaphor, Morris cuts back and forth to images of a deep blue sea, significantly more fathomable than Rumsfeld himself.
As to any possible policy misfires during his Washington tenures, Rumsfeld blithely chalks them up to the unintended consequences of war, executive decision-making and the inevitable inability for leaders like him to anticipate everything, for Pete’s sake: i.e., heck, Stuff Happens. This expedient philosophy can rationalize pretty much any horrors stretching from Abu Ghraib to Gitmo. If only Emily Littella were still on active duty, I know she’d just say, “Never mind.”
And so it goes in Rummy-speak, as Morris sends his cameras down the rabbit hole into an upside-down universe where government morality and mea culpas have no standing, yet mad tautologies like “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence” do. In the question of those well-known phantom WMDs, such inane statements can justify anything, including interminable wars in which bodies are still piling up, peace is not won, and mass Mideast destruction marches on.
I am a former Google employee and I am writing this to leak information to the public of what I
witnessed and took part in while being an employee. My position was to deal with AdSense accounts,
more specifically the accounts of publishers (not advertisers). I was employed at Google for a period of
several years in this capacity.
Having signed many documents such as NDA’s and non-competes, there are many repercussions for me,
especially in the form of legal retribution from Google. I have carefully planned this leak to coincide with
certain factors in Google such as waiting for the appropriate employee turn around so that my identity
could not be discovered.
To sum it up for everyone, I took part in what I (and many others) would consider theft of money from
the publishers by Google, and from direct orders of management. There were many AdSense employees
involved, and it spanned many years, and I hear it still is happening today except on a much wider scale.
No one on the outside knows it, if they did, the FBI and possibly IRS would immediately launch an
investigation, because what they are doing is so inherently illegal and they are flying completely under
the radar.
It began in 2009. Everything was perfectly fine prior to 2009, and in fact it couldn’t be more perfect from
an AdSense employees perspective, but something changed.
Google Bans and Ban Criteria
Before December 2012:
In the first quarter of 2009 there was a “sit-down” from the AdSense division higher ups to talk about
new emerging issues and the role we (the employees in the AdSense division needed to play. It was a
very long meeting, and it was very detailed and intense. What it boiled down to was that Google had
suffered some very serious losses in the financial department several months earlier. They kept saying
how we “needed to tighten the belts” and they didn’t want it to come from Google employees pockets.
So they were going to (in their words) “carry out extreme quality control on AdSense publishers”. When
one of my fellow co-workers asked what they meant by that. Their response was that AdSense itself
hands out too many checks each month to publishers, and that the checks were too large and that
needed to end right away. Many of the employees were not pleased about this (like myself). But they
were successful in scaring the rest into thinking it would be their jobs and their money that would be on
the line if they didn’t participate. The meeting left many confused as to how this was going to happen.
What did they mean by extreme quality control? A few other smaller meetings occur with certain key
people in the AdSense division that furthered the idea and procedure they planned on implementing.
There were lots of rumors and quiet talking amongst the employees, there was lots of speculations,
some came true and some didn’t. But the word was that they were planning to cut off a large portion of
publisher’s payments.
After that point there was a running gag amongst fellow co-workers where we would walk by each other
and whisper “Don’t be evil, pft!” and roll our eyes.
What happened afterwards became much worse. Their “quality control” came into full effect. Managers
pushed for wide scale account bans, and the first big batch of bans happened in March of 2009. The
main reason, the publishers made too much money. But something quite devious happened. We were
told to begin banning accounts that were close to their payout period (which is why account bans never
occur immediately after a payout). The purpose was to get that money owed to publishers back to
Google AdSense, while having already served up the ads to the public.
This way the advertiser’s couldn’t claim we did not do our part in delivering their ads and ask for money
back. So in a sense, we had thousands upon thousands of publishers deliver ads we knew they were
never going to get paid for.
Google reaped both sides of the coin, got money from the advertisers, used the publishers, and didn’t
have to pay them a single penny. We were told to go and look into the publishers accounts, and if any
publisher had accumulated earnings exceeding $5000 and was near a payout or in the process of a
payout, we were to ban the account right away and reverse the earnings back. They kept saying it was
needed for the company, and that most of these publishers were ripping Google off anyways, and that
their gravy train needed to end. Many employees were not happy about this. A few resigned over it.
I did not. I stayed because I had a family to support, and secondly I wanted to see how far they would
go.
From 2009 to 2012 there were many more big batches of bans. The biggest of all the banning sessions
occurred in April of 2012. The AdSense division had enormous pressure from the company to make up
for financial losses, and for Google’s lack of reaching certain internal financial goals for the quarter prior.
So the push was on. The employees felt really uneasy about the whole thing, but we were threatened
with job losses if we didn’t enforce the company’s wishes. Those who voiced concerned or issue were
basically ridiculed with “not having the company’s best interest in mind” and not being “team players”.
Morale in the division was at an all-time low. The mood of the whole place changed quite rapidly. It no
longer was a fun place to work.
The bans of April 2012 came fast and furious. Absolutely none of them were investigated, nor were they
justified in any way. We were told to get rid of as many of the accounts with the largest
checks/payouts/earnings waiting to happen. No reason, just do it, and don’t question it. It was heart
wrenching seeing all that money people had earned all get stolen from them. And that’s what I saw it as,
it was a robbery of the AdSense publishers. Many launched appeals, complaints, but it was futile
because absolutely no one actually took the time to review the appeals or complaints. Most were simply
erased without even being opened, the rest were deposited into the database, never to be touched
again.
Several publishers launched legal actions which were settled, but Google had come up with a new policy
to deal with situations such as that because it was perceived as a serious problem to be avoided.
So they came up with a new policy.
After December 2012: The New Policy
The new policy; “shelter the possible problem makers, and fuck the rest” (those words were actually
said by a Google AdSense exec) when he spoke about the new procedure and policy for “Account
Quality Control”.
The new policy was officially called AdSense Quality Control Color Codes (commonly called AQ3C by
employees). What it basically was a categorization of publisher accounts. Those publisher’s that could
do the most damage by having their account banned were placed in a VIP group that was to be left
alone. The rest of the publishers would be placed into other groupings accordingly.
The new AQ3C also implemented “quality control” quotas for the account auditors, so if you didn’t meet
the “quality control” target (aka account bans) you would be called in for a performance review.
There were four “groups” publishers could fall into if they reached certain milestones.
They were:
Red Group: Urgent Attention Required
Any AdSense account that reaches the $10,000/month mark is immediately flagged (unless they are part
of the Green Group).
– In the beginning there were many in this category, and most were seen as problematic and were seen
as abusing the system by Google. So every effort was taken to bring their numbers down.
– They are placed in what employees termed “The Eagle Eye”, where the “AdSense Eagle Eye Team”
would actively and constantly audit their accounts and look for any absolute reason for a ban. Even if
the reason was far-fetched, or unsubstantiated, and unprovable, the ban would occur. The “Eagle Eye
Team” referred to a group of internal account auditors whose main role was to constantly monitor
publisher’s accounts and sites.
– A reason has to be internally attached to the account ban. The problem was that notifying the
publisher for the reason is not a requirement, even if the publisher asks. The exception: The exact
reason must be provided if a legal representative contacts Google on behalf of the account holder.
– But again, if a ban is to occur, it must occur as close to a payout period as possible with the most
amount of money accrued/earned. Yellow Group: Serious Attention Required
Any AdSense account that reaches the $5,000/month mark is flagged for review (unless they are part of
the Green Group).
– All of the publisher’s site(s)/account will be placed in queue for an audit.
– Most of the time the queue is quite full so most are delayed their audit in a timely fashion.
– The second highest amount of bans occur at this level.
– A reason has to be internally attached to the account ban. Notifiying the publisher for the reason is not
a requirement, even if the publisher asks. The exception: The exact reason must be provided if a legal
representative contacts Google on behalf of the account holder.
– But again, if a ban is to occur, it must occur as close to a payout period as possible with the most
amount of money accrued/earned. Blue Group: Moderate Attention Required
Any AdSense account that reaches the $1,000/month mark is flagged for possible review (unless they
are part of the Green Group).
– Only the main site and account will be place in queue for what is called a quick audit.
– Most bans that occur happen at this level. Main reason is that a reason doesn’t have to be attached to
the ban, so the employees use these bans to fill their monthly quotas. So many are simply a random pick
and click.
– A reason does not have to be internally attached to the account ban. Notifying the publisher for the
reason is not a requirement, even if the publisher asks.
– But again, if a ban is to occur, it must occur as close to a payout period as possible with the most
amount of money accrued. Green Group: VIP Status (what employees refer to as the “untouchables”)
Any AdSense account associated with an incorporated entity or individual that can inflict serious
damage onto Google by negative media information, rallying large amounts of anti-AdSense support, or
cause mass loss of AdSense publisher support.
– Google employees wanting to use AdSense on their websites were automatically placed in the Green
group. So the database contained many Google insiders and their family members. If you work or
worked for Google and were placed in the category, you stayed in it, even if you left Google. So it
included many former employees. Employees simply had to submit a form with site specific details and
their account info.
– Sites in the Green Group were basically given “carte blanche” to do anything they wanted, even if they
flagrantly went against the AdSense TOS and Policies. That is why you will encounter sites with AdSense,
but yet have and do things completely against AdSense rules.
– Extra care is taken not to interrupt or disrupt these accounts.
– If an employee makes a mistake with a Green Level account they can lose their job. Since it seen as
very grievous mistake. New Policy 2012 Part 2:
Internal changes to the policy were constant. They wanted to make it more efficient and streamlined.
They saw its current process as having too much human involvement and oversight. They wanted it
more automated and less involved.
So the other part of the new policy change was to incorporate other Google services into assisting the
“quality control” program. What they came up with will anger many users when they find out. It
involved skewing data in Google Analytics. They decided it was a good idea to alter the statistical data
shown for websites. It first began with just altering data reports for Analytics account holders that also
had an AdSense account, but they ran into too many issues and decided it would be simpler just to skew
the report data across the board to remain consistent and implement features globally.
So what this means is that the statistical data for a website using Google Analytics is not even close to
being accurate. The numbers are incredibly deflated. The reasoning behind their decision is that if an
individual links their AdSense account and their Analytics account, the Analytics account can be used to
deflate the earnings automatically without any human intervention. They discovered that if an individual
had an AdSense account then they were also likely to use Google Analytics. So Google used it to their
advantage.
This led to many publishers to actively display ads, without earning any money at all (even to this day).
Even if their actual website traffic was high, and had high click-throughs the data would be automatically
skewed in favor of Google, and at a total loss of publishers. This successfully made it almost impossible
for anyone to earn amounts even remotely close what individuals with similar sites were earning prior
to 2012, and most definitely nowhere near pre-2009 earnings.
Other policy changes also included how to deal with appeals, which still to this day, the large majority
are completely ignored, and why you will rarely get an actual answer as to why your account was
banned and absolutely no way to resolve it.
—- The BIG Problem (which Google is aware of)
There is an enormous problem that existed for a long time in Google’s AdSense accounts. Many of the
upper management are aware of this problem but do not want to acknowledge or attempt to come up
with a solution to the problem.
It is regarding false clicks on ads. Many accounts get banned for “invalid clicks” on ads. In the past this
was caused by a publisher trying to self inflate click-throughs by clicking on the ads featured on their
website. The servers automatically detect self-clicking with comparison to IP addresses and other such
information, and the persons account would get banned for invalid clicking.
But there was something forming under the surface. A competitor or malicious person would actively go
to their competitor’s website(s) or pick a random website running AdSense and begin multiple-clicking
and overclicking ads, which they would do over and over again. Of course this would trigger an invalid
clicking related ban, mainly because it could not be proven if the publisher was actually behind the
clicking. This was internally referred to as “Click-Bombing”. Many innocent publishers would get caught
up in bans for invalid clicks which they were not involved in and were never told about.
This issue has been in the awareness of Google for a very long time but nothing was done to rectify the
issue and probably never will be. Thus if someone wants to ruin a Google AdSense publishers account,
all you would have to do is go to their website, and start click-bombing their Google Ads over and over
again, it will lead the servers to detect invalid clicks and poof, they get banned. The publisher would be
completely innocent and unaware of the occurrence but be blamed for it anyways.
—-
Their BIG Fear
The biggest fear that Google has about these AdSense procedures and policies is that it will be publicly
discovered by their former publishers who were banned, and that those publishers unite together and
launch an class-action lawsuit.
They also fear those whose primary monthly earnings are from AdSense, because in many countries if a
person claims the monthly amount to their tax agency and they state the monthly amount and that they
are earning money from Google on a monthly basis, in certain nations technically Google can be seen as
an employer. Thus, an employer who withholds payment of earnings, can be heavily fined by
government bodies dealing with labor and employment. And if these government bodies dealing with
labor and employment decide to go after Google, then it would get very ugly, very quickly ….. that is on
top of a class-action lawsuit.
Snowden made video to teach reporter how to speak with him securely
It explains how to use Public Key Encryption to scramble online messages
Privacy campaigners call on ordinary people to learn how to use the method
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Whistleblower: The tutorial Edward Snowden made for reporters on to avoid NSA email surveillance has been made public for the first time
Ordinary people must learn to scramble their emails, privacy campaigners said today, as an encryption how-to video made by Edward Snowden was made public for the first time.
The former NSA employee who blew the whistle on the agency’s all-pervasive online surveillance made the video to teach reporters how to communicate with him in secret.
The 12-minute clip, in which Mr Snowden has used software to distort his voiceover, explains how to use free software to scramble messages using a technique called Public Key Encryption (PKE).
The video’s description on Vimeo says: ‘By following these instructions, you’ll allow any potential source in the world to send you a powerfully encrypted message that ONLY YOU can read even if the two of you have never met or exchanged contact information.’
Mr Snowden made the video last year for Glenn Greenwald in an effort to get the then-Guardian reporter to communicate securely with him online so he could send over documents he wanted to leak.
Viewers may find the video difficult to follow. Mr Greenwald himself admitted he wasn’t able to finish it. It took him seven weeks and help from experts to finally gather the expertise to get back to Snowden.
The video’s publication comes as more and more internet users are adopting encryption techniques after the alarm caused by Mr Snowden’s revelations about communications surveillance.
He leaked documents which showed the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ were able to spy on virtually anybody’s communications and internet usage, monitor social network activity in real time, and track and record the locations of billions of mobile devices.
There was outrage when it emerged that, contrary to promises the NSA made to Congress, these technologies were being used to track U.S. citizens without warrants and to tap the communications of leaders of allied countries.
One answer to the risks to freedom that such surveillance pose is to scramble online communications so that government agencies can no longer eavesdrop at will.
However, the encryption technologies currently available can be difficult to use and privacy activists have called on internet companies to include them in their products at the source.
Meanwhile, the campaign to end blanket surveillance continues as experts warn encryption tools are unlikely to make their way into the mainstream while internet firms continue to make their profits on the back of users’ personal information.
Scroll down for video
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How-to guide: The video begins with a basic outline of the theory behind Public Key Encryption. It is voiced over by Mr Snowden, who has disguised his voice to avoid detection by NSA or GCHQ spies
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Detailed: The video then explains how to use a free program called GPG4Win to scramble messages using Public Key Encryption then send them over Tor, software that allows people to use the internet anonymously
In Mr Snowden’s video, he explains how traditional emails are sent as plain text – unencrypted by default – across the internet, allowing anyone able to intercept them to easily read their contents.
‘Any router you cross could be monitored by an intelligence agency or other adversary [such as] a random hacker. So could any end points on the way there, a mail server or a service provider such as Gmail.
‘If the journalist uses a web mail service personally or its provisioned by their company, the plain text could always be retrieved later on via a subpoena or some other mechanism, legal or illegal, instead of catching it during transit. So that’s doubly dangerous
‘The solution to that is to actually encrypt the message. Now one of the problems with encryption typically is that it requires a shared secret, a form of key or password that goes between the journalist and the source.
‘But if the source sends an encypted file across the internet to the journalist and says “Hey, here’s an encrypted file. The passwork is cheesecake,” the internet is going to know the password is cheesecake.
‘But public key encryption such as GPG allows the journalist to publish a key that anyone can have based on the design of the algorithm, and it doesn’t provide any advantage to the adversary.’
The video goes on to specifically explain how to use a free program called GPG4Win to scramble messages using Public Key Encryption then send them over Tor, a piece of software that allows people to use the internet anonymously.
It’s lessons, as well as help from experts, allowed Mr Greenwald to communicate securely with Mr Snowden to publish what has since been called the most significant leak in U.S. history. It has been made public to coincide with the release of Mr Greenwald’s book, No Place To Hide, in which he tells the story of the scoop.
Privacy campaigners told MailOnline today that all internet users should be now using encryption technology to preserve their privacy and maintain freedom of speech in the face of government spying.
Javier Ruiz, director of policy at the Open Rights Group, said: ‘Emails are like postcards and encryption is a tamper-proof envelope.
‘It’s probably obvious that journalists, MPs, doctors, lawyers or anyone transmitting confidential information online should always encrypt their emails to keep that information secure.
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http://youtu.be/jo0L2m6OjLA
‘But since the Snowden revelations, more and more ordinary citizens are adopting encryption software to help keep their emails private.
‘If encryption is to be used on a mass scale, it will require companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft to embed encryption in their tools.’
But TK Keanini, chief technology officer at internet security firm Lancope, said that it was unlikely that major internet companies would begin including encryption functions in their services as standard.
‘PGP and similar programs are just too complicated for the masses,’ he said. ‘Managing key pairs, understanding revocation and all that stuff is too complicated for most, and thus adoption over the past 20 years has been limited to the highly technical – the uber geeks.
‘Now, if a service like gmail.com had an option in there to perform digital signing and encryption in a way that most people could use it, that would have a huge impact; but it will never happen because Google and other ‘free’ services make their money on the fact that your data is in the clear and they can use it to market services to you.
‘People need to understand that when people offer free services, you and your information are the payment.’
‘While people can use technology to empower themselves, we must also challenge the policies of Government and intelligence agencies to end the unlawful mass surveillance of people around the world’
Mike Rispoli, a spokesman for Privacy International, echoed those sentiments, but added that there needs to be more pressure on government to stop them from snooping on the private lives of ordinary people.
‘It is critical that people use all technology at their disposal to keep their communications private and secure,’ he said.
‘We should all support the creation and widespread use of these tools. Ultimately, however, people should never have to do more or go to extra lengths to protect their rights.
‘This is why we need political, legal, as well as technological, solutions to ensure that our privacy rights are protected.
‘While people can use technology to empower themselves, we must also challenge the policies of Government and intelligence agencies to end the unlawful mass surveillance of people around the world.’
It’s time to demand an end to the cover-up of the leading cause of breast cancer – tight bras.
It’s been 20 years since our research showing a major link between breast cancer and the wearing of tight bras for long periods of time daily was announced to cancer experts in our book, Dressed To Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras.
Cancer charities don’t care about a cure
This breakthrough information was promptly ignored, ridiculed, and censored by the very people and organizations whose mission is to find a cure and cause of this modern day epidemic.
Despite the resistance, our message did get out to millions of women, some of whom discovered on themselves that ending the habit of constricting their breasts with bras improved overall breast health – including reducing breast pain, cysts, and tenderness.
Boycott breast cancer charities: Send you’re your bra instead of money!
While the cancer industry still thinks of the lymphatic system as merely the pathway for the spread of cancer, leading them to remove lymph nodes creating painful and disabling lymphedema in their patients, there are now more healthcare providers who understand the vital role the lymphatic system plays in disease prevention.
They understand how constriction of the lymphatic drainage from the breasts caused by tight bras can result in tissue toxification, cysts, pain, and ultimately, cancer.
But, despite the successes of women regaining breast health by altering their bra wearing habits, the cancer detection and treatment industry has consistently and arrogantly dismissed the bra-cancer link.
Does a bra really contribute to breast cancer?
It does, according to at least 5 research studies and numerous healthcare providers, including oncologists and MD’s. Even some lingerie manufacturers have developed new bra designs hoping to minimize lymphatic constriction and thereby help prevent breast cancer – citing the bra-cancer theory for their patents.
But it doesn’t, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the Susan G. Komen Foundation, fundraising giants of the cancer detection and treatment world – which consider the link absurd and unworthy of serious consideration, and unquestionably assume that research showing a link must have some other explanation besides bras.
Shrugging off the bra-cancer link is killing hundreds of thousands of women and wasting billions of dollars in unnecessary detection and treatment.
As breast cancer researchers, we are calling for a boycott of these organizations until they stop dismissing the bra-cancer link, and begin educating doctors and women about the cancer hazards of wearing tight bras.
What is the risk of wearing a bra?
Our research showed that bra-free women have about the same incidence of breast cancer as men, and that the tighter and longer a bra is worn the higher the incidence rose, up to 100 times greater for 24/7 bra wearers.
Why are women not hearing about this from the ACS and Komen Foundation? Why are these organizations, so eager to fund raise for a cure, so opposed to preventing this disease by addressing the bra-cancer link?
Could it be because lingerie companies donate to their charities? Could it be that preventing this disease by challenging the cultural norm of bra wearing is too taboo for these detection and treatment focused organizations?
Whatever their reason, it is wrong for the bra-cancer link to be dismissed and ignored. Because of this unscientific stonewalling of this information, over the past 20 years 2,000,000 women in the United States alone have gotten breast cancer – which may have been prevented by simply loosening their bra and wearing it less often, each day.
So, when the ACS or Komen Foundation ask for a donation, send them your bra, instead. This will give them the message, and help you prevent breast cancer at the same time.
About the author: Sydney Ross Singer is a world-renown medical anthropologist, author, and director of the Institute for the Study of Culturogenic Disease, located in Hawaii. A pioneer in the field of applied medical anthropology, Sydney, along with his wife and co-author, Soma Grismaijer have written numerous groundbreaking books that provide new theories, research, and revelations on disease causation and prevention, including the internationally acclaimed book, Dressed To Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras. For more information – visit:KillerCulture.com
“Scientific evidence does not support a link between wearing an underwire bra (or any type of bra) and an increased risk of breast cancer. There is no biological reason the two would be linked, and any observed relationship is likely due to other factors.”
Internet e-mail rumors and at least one book have suggested that bras cause breast cancer by obstructing lymph flow. There is no good scientific or clinical basis for this claim.
1991 Harvard study (CC Hsieh, D Trichopoulos (1991). Breast size, handedness and breast cancer risk. European Journal of Cancer and Clinical Oncology 27(2):131-135.). This study found that, “Premenopausal women who do not wear bras had half the risk of breast cancer compared with bra users…”
1991-93 U.S. Bra and Breast Cancer Study by Singer and Grismaijer, published in Dressed To Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras (Avery/Penguin Putnam, 1995; ISCD Press, 2005). Found that bra-free women have about the same incidence of breast cancer as men. 24/7 bra wearing increases incidence over 100 times that of a bra-free woman.
Singer and Grismaijer did a follow-up study in Fiji, published in Get It Off! (ISCD Press, 2000). Found 24 case histories of breast cancer in a culture where half the women are bra-free. The women getting breast cancer were all wearing bras. Given women with the same genetics and diet and living in the same village, the ones getting breast disease were the ones wearing bras for work.
A 2009 Chinese study (Zhang AQ, Xia JH, Wang Q, Li WP, Xu J, Chen ZY, Yang JM (2009). [Risk factors of breast cancer in women in Guangdong and the countermeasures]. In Chinese. Nan Fang Yi Ke Da Xue Xue Bao. 2009 Jul;29(7):1451-3.) found that NOT sleeping in a bra was protective against breast cancer, lowering the risk 60%.
2011 a study was published, in Spanish, confirming that bras are causing breast disease and cancer.http://www.portalesmedicos.com/publicaciones/articles/3691/1/Patologias-mamarias-generadas-por-el-uso-sostenido-y-seleccion-incorrecta-del-brassier-en-pacientes-que-acuden-a-la-consulta-de-mastologia- It found that underwired and push-up bras are the most harmful, but any bra that leaves red marks or indentations may cause disease.
For those who are completely new to the Palantir Platform or could simply use a refresher, this talk will start from scratch and provide a broad overview of Palantir’s origins and mission. A live demonstration of the product will help to familiarize newcomers with Palantir’s intuitive graphical interface and revolutionary analytical functionality, while highlighting the major engineering innovations that make it all possible. -Palantir
The @YourAnonNews Twitter account has been at the centre of a major upheval in the Anonymous community in the last few days, centring on missing funds of $35,000. Twitter
“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.” – John F. Kennedy
Anonymous is just such an idea.
However details about in-fighting, backstabbing and missing fundraising donations which were made public over the weekend, threaten to undermine the trust people have in the movement – and especially one of its most prominent voices.
Your Anonymous News (@YourAnonNews) is one of the best known and loudest voices within the Anonymous group of hacktivists, but the person most associated with its operation, Christopher Banks (aka Jackal) has been accused of stealing $35,000 (£20,720) from a fundraising campaign which was designed to help build a new website for the account.
The details about what has happened over the weekend and prior to the events beaming public are confusing and contradictory depending on who you talk to, so let’s first go back to the beginning.
Anonymous’ powerful voice
As I said, Anonymous is an idea rather than a specific group of people, but certain voices within the movement came to the fore in the last few years.
Chief amongst these was the Twitter account @YourAnonNews which was created in April 2011 and was run primarily by a member of Anonymous known as Jackal.
Jackal was in fact Christopher Banks who lived in Denver, and over the next three years the account grew to become the most powerful voice within Anonymous. It currently has over 1.24 million followers.
While Jackal was in charge, running the account alone became too much work and so multiple members of Anonymous were brought on board to help out. At one point up to 25 people had access to the account and it was so well organised, it even had a highly detailed style guide.
Crowd-funding anarchy
In early 2013, Jackal and a few of the other prominent people running the account decided that they wanted to build a website with the goal of creating “a weekly news show, provide embedded coverage of direct actions, and run a new website to help ignite protest and DIY journalism around the world.”
The group turned to Indiegogo, the crowd-funding website and having set out with a goal of raising just $2,000, within weeks it saw 1,307 people donating a total of $54,668.
There were questions raised at the time about the logic of donating money to a project which was so ill-defined – and over a year later those concerns look to have been validated.
Truth and reconciliation
According to a Truth and Reconciliation document published this weekend, the donations were received by Jackal minus deductions from Indiegogo (4%) and credit card fees (3%).
The money was then used to pay for the merchandise which was promised in return for donations, including t-shirts, mugs, buttons, and stickers. The money was also used to buy laptops, broadband access and server time.
The total amount of money accounted for was $19,959, meaning that $34,709 remains unaccounted for.
This was to become the crux of a dispute among those who took charge of YourAnonNews in late 2013.
In October of 2013, Dell Cameron, a reporter with the Daily Dot and someone who had been involved with the Anonymous movement since the Arab Spring, got involved with the account and quickly realised there was something wrong.
None of the merchandise had been posted and there was no sign of the remaining money.
Cameron decided that he needed to get legal advice because, as he told IBTimes UK: “I was taking ownership of an account that had been used to commit a crime.”
Creating a non-profit
Cameron along with others involved with the account including Nicole Powers, Gregg Housh and lawyer Tor Ekeland, came together to form a de facto board to try and administer the account. Their plan was to move the intellectual property into a non-profit organisation which would run the account in the future.
The first point of business was to raise money in order to send out all the merchandise, which was done by raising private donations of $9,000.
At this point Banks still had access to the @YourAnonNews account and this was something Cameron was not happy with, but he was willing to let it be while the group tried to get answers from him about the missing money.
This situation continued until last week, when Cameron – along with Dan Stuckey, a reporter for Vice who was brought on board the @YourAnonNews account – told Ekeland at a meeting in New York that they were going to take control of the account and shut everyone else out.
Ekeland was able to talk them out of making a rash decision at the time, but in the middle of the night on Friday morning, Cameron went ahead with his plan and locked Ekeland, Powers and Housh out of the account, as well as Banks – a move Cameron claims was done with the consent of seven other YourAnonNews contributors.
Imploding
What followed was the cyber equivalent of mud-slinging with wild rumour and speculation being thrown around on social media channels.
Gabriella Coleman, professor at McGill University and an expert on Anonymous, told IBTimes UK that she has never seen anything like what happened on Thursday and Friday last week, when there were so many rumours being slung around various channels online.
It led the three exiled account members to publish the Truth and Reconciliation document on Saturday in an attempt to explain the situation.
By the time the document was published however, Cameron had already relinquished control of the account, following widespread criticism of his usurping of power. Control of the account was handed over to a group of Anonymous members based in Denver, who continue to operate it.
A deal with the devil
Speaking to both Cameron and Ekeland to try and find out exactly what happened, it’s clear there is a difference in opinion.
Cameron believes that Ekeland had done a deal with Banks which would simply brush the missing $35,000 under the carpet and allow him continue using the account – though without anyone knowing this publicly. This was unacceptable to Cameron.
Ekeland admitted he was indeed talking to Banks, but that they were only at the point of negotiation, and that any deal would have been brought to the board for approval, something Ekeland says Cameron was fully aware of.
A email sent by Cameron relating to the situation was also leaked over the weekend, in which Cameron makes potentially libellous and unsubstantiated claims about where the $35,000 went.
“You’re going to f**king regret it”
Cameron says he has personally asked Banks 12 times where the money is, and each time he has refused to give an answer. So far, Banks has remained silent on Twitter about anything to do with this debacle.
Cameron claims he was threatened by Ekeland before the email was leaked, saying: “He didn’t get specific, but he said if you publish a letter like this, you’re going to f**king regret it.”
Ekeland flatly denies that he threatened Cameron adding that he is happy to be no longer involved with the account, having immediately resigned from the board once Cameron locked him out of the account on Friday morning.
Ekeland likened the in-fighting over the @YourAnonNews account to the ring in The Lord of the Rings: “It drives people crazy, they get greedy for it, everyone wants it.”
Ekeland accused Cameron of wanting control of the feed for personal gain, something the Daily Dot reporter denies, claiming he only wanted “to do good” when he joined up.
Despite being the opposite side of the argument, Cameron echoes Ekeland’s sentiments:
“At the end, this is not about Anonymous, this is about a group of people fighting over a social media account. These are grown people squabbling like kids over the equivalent of a toy in the sandbox.”
The future of @YourAnonNews?
Coleman believes that YourAnonNews was close to imploding and that while the Truth and Reconciliation statement which was published on Saturday “may not be enough to save them, it is the wedge that gives them a chance [to survive].”
Numerous Anonymous accounts have been highly critical of the group over recent months for failing to make a public statement on the matter.
In the wake of the statement being made, while there is some appeasement, others believe that the YourAnonNews brand is tarnished forever and should be let to disappear completely.
Coleman counters that the rebirth like this should be expected:
“The strength of Anonymous is to have some points of stability but to be ad hoc and reborn. And it is definitely a great period to be reborn – whether that is going to happen or not is always an open questions.”
What the long-term impact this fiasco will have on @YourAnonNews – and more widely on the Anonymous movement – isn’t clear at this point.
What is clear is that $35,000 of donor’s money is still missing and unaccounted for, and the fight for control of the hugely popular and powerful @YourAnonNews account looks to be only just beginning.
* Use the hashtag #PayPal14. Respond to tweets from @Pierre and @ggreenwald. Don’t forget Greenwald’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/glenn.greenwald.5
PRESS RELEASE
The PayPal14 were arrested nearly three years ago on the front lines of the digital information war, helping put the hacktivist movement and specifically Anonymous on the map. Now the whistleblower/hacktivist culture they helped launch into the global spotlight is being co-opted by journalists and “tech bros” all over to advance their careers, most notably journalist Glenn Greenwald’s.
As Greenwald gets a book tour, the PayPal14 get sentencing hearings. He is traveling the world to promote his book about Snowden’s NSA leaks, and the 14 are struggling to raise more than $80,000 in court-ordered restitution for eBay/PayPal, companies ultimately overseen by Greenwald’s billionaire backer, Pierre Omidyar. The brand that popularized Pierre-Greenwald’s Snowden leaks is only so “edgy” and “cool” because heroes like the PayPal14 took direct action.
When PayPal, part of Pierre’s eBay, blocked donations to WikiLeaks, the 14 and many others saw that the company wasn’t just a means of transferring money. It was also a means of control. PayPal’s blockade attacked our ability to vote with our dollars. Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, and Western Union also participated in the financial blockade, a blatant corporate attempt at silencing dissent and suppressing information. The blockade destroyed 95% of WikiLeaks’ revenue.
The 14 along with countless others bravely launched DDOS attacks, the digital equivalent of sit-ins, against PayPal to protest the unjust blockade. They shut down PayPal’s public website briefly without interfering with backend financial transactions or causing lasting harm, contrary to Department of “Justice” claims in court. After having their lives disrupted for years, 11 of the PayPal14 still face federal charges. Greenwald faces applause.
Sure, Greenwald and Pierre occasionally express tepid “support” for the PayPal14. But where’s the $80,000? That’s lunch money to Greenwald or Pierre. For the PayPal14, it’s a crushing financial burden. Pierre, according to Forbes, rakes in $7.8 billion per year while the PayPal14 struggle to stay afloat. Pierre started off First Look, Greenwald’s news media outlet, with $50 million in funding–tens of millions more than $80,000.
Greenwald and Pierre aren’t just riding the hacktivist movement–they’re watering it down. As a consequence, most of Snowden’s NSA leaks go unpublished. What is published is heavily redacted, preventing more aggressive, non-celebrity journalists from finding answers and pro-freedom hackers from building better defenses.
Ask yourself, Why isn’t Greenwald facing charges? Why isn’t he asking countries for asylum?
The PayPal14 put themselves on the front lines for something genuinely revolutionary. They grabbed the mainstream media’s attention and helped establish the “digital information war” culture that boosts this new kind of journalism. But the mainstream media has finished enjoying the spectacle of the PayPal14’s arrests. Now they’re watching Greenwald sign books, while the PayPal14, largely forgotten, sign plea deals.
Some rising players in the digital information war have confided that they believe we should make noise for the
PayPal14 at Greenwald’s book tour stops. But they’ve also confessed that doing so would put their financial interests in jeopardy. The tentacles of Greenwald/Pierre/First Look are spreading and snatching up people right and left. Thanks to Jeremy Hammond’s Stratfor leak, we better understand how corporate interests isolate radicals who try to create change. The “Duchin formula,” continued by the private intelligence firm Stratfor, states that opportunists “by definition … take the opportunity to side with the powerful for career gain” and bring the realists and idealists along with them, leaving the radicals exposed and unsupported.
We ask you to support the radicals and not the careerists. Your worst enemy is not the person in opposition to you. It is the person occupying the spot you would be fighting from and doing nothing.
The goal is to raise that $80,000. If we do that, we win this battle. For now, everything else is secondary. Supporting the PayPal14 doesn’t just mean one tweet and you’re done. It means constant effort.
Specifically, attend Greenwald’s book tour stops listed below. If they’re sold out–and most are NOT–still go and make noise outside (or get inside anyway!). For sold-out events, there are often stand-by lines in case extra seats become available. Take the steps below, inside or outside the event–or both!
1. This is crucial: Make sure people are equipped to record videos of the protest, including Greenwald’s responses, and upload them as soon as possible. Share them with the hashtag #PayPal14. If possible, videos should include the donation link – http://www.gofundme.com/PayPal14 – and text accompanying the video should include the link also.
2. Explain why you’re protesting the book tour, by mic-checking, passing out fliers, waving signs, or any other useful method. Get creative! “Pay Back the PayPal14” and “Obey eBay” and “Glenn Greenbacks” would make good slogans. Above all, make sure people get the donation link: http://www.gofundme.com/PayPal14 This can be done online, but it is critical that it be done in person at the book tour stops as well, making as much noise as possible. Occupy the book tour stops!
3. When are Greenwald and Pierre donating? You find out!
BOOK TOUR STOPS AND LINKS FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THE PAYPAL14:
1. New York City, Tuesday May 13. 7:00-8:30 pm
Cooper Union’s Great Hall, in the Foundation Building
7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues
East Village in Manhattan
May 13, 2014 7:00 pm
Admission is free and open the public on a first-come first-served basis.
http://www.cooper.edu/events-and-exhibitions/events/authors-talk-glenn-greenwald-edward-snowden-and-nsa
2. Washington DC, Wednesday May 14. Doors at 6 pm, event at 7 pm.
Politics & Prose Bookstore
5015 Connecticut Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20008
May 14, 2014 7:00 pm
Doors and Will-call open at 6pm
1 General Admission Ticket: $17.00
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/639084
3. Boston, Thursday May 15. 7 pm.
First Parish Church
1446 Massachusetts Avenu
Cambridge, MA 02138
May 15, 2014 7:00 pm
Ticket costs $5, stand-by only
http://www.harvard.com/event/glenn_greenwald2/
http://www.harvard.com/about/sold_out_event_faq/
4. Amsterdam, Tuesday May 20. 20:00-21:30
Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam – Rabozaal
Leidseplein 26
1017 PT Amsterdam
May 20, 2014 20:00 – 21:30
http://www.ssba.nl/page.ocl?pageid=3&ev=56684
https://shop.ticketscript.com/channel/web2/get-dates/rid/CC235T4A/eid/210218/language/nl/format/html
Tickets range from € 18,27 to € 26,27
5. Seattle, Los Angeles, San Fransisco, and San Diego: Mid-June. (No information available yet.)
* Updated book tour information may become available here https://twitter.com/ggreenwald here https://www.facebook.com/glenn.greenwald.5 or here https://www.facebook.com/glenn.greenwald.5/posts/10152804684159112
MOST IMPORTANTLY, ask people to donate to the PayPal14 by going here:
http://www.gofundme.com/PayPal14
PayPal 14 Homepage (in progress):
http://thepaypal14.com/support.htm
Microfinancing by Pierre’s Omidyar Network is loan-sharking the world’s most vulnerable:
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/extraordinary-pierre-omidyar/
News articles about the PayPal14:
https://medium.com/quinn-norton/66077450917e
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/05/inside-the-paypal-14-trial.html
Pierre Omidyar profile on Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/profile/pierre-omidyar/
WikiLeaks on the financial blockade:
https://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html
Pierre started off First Look with $50 million in funding:
http://omidyargroup.com/firstlookmedia/pierre-omidyar-provides-initial-funding-of-50m-to-establish-first-look-media/
SPECIAL NOTE: This press release is intended to make sure people’s voices are heard in a way that educates the public.
Self-sufficiency has gone mainstream, which means that more and more people, including many urban dwellers, are looking for easy and effective ways to produce food and care for their families without having to rely on the system for sustenance. Since knowing where to start with all this is half the battle, here are some amazing homesteading ideas to get you and your family on track to becoming more autonomous in an increasingly centralized and unstable world:
1) Build an aquaponics system for high-output vegetables
It might seem daunting at first, but raising fish and using their waste to grow food crops without soil, a process more popularly known as aquaponics, can actually be quite simple. Raising fish in small water tanks generates ammonia-containing waste, which can then be converted into nitrite for fixation in growing soils. Nitrite is then converted into both nitrobacter and nitrospira, two substances that are crucial for maintaining the necessary nitrogen cycle, which promotes plant growth.
“Fish excrete ammonia in their wastes and through their gills,” explains aquaponics expert Rebecca Nelson in a piece for the Aquaponics Journal, which explains how to build your aquaponics system at home. “Nitrifying bacteria, which naturally live in the soil, water and air, convert ammonia first to nitrite and then to nitrate… [which] is used by plants to grow and flourish.”
Since pre-built aquaponics systems can cost thousands of dollars, building your own may be the preferable option. Nelson’s article explains how to build a simple aquaponics system for around $100 that, depending on its size, can stow away nicely in a space as small as the floor of a closet: http://aquaponics.com.
2) Construct a backyard chicken coop for fresh eggs
In many ways, owning chickens is a lot like owning a dog, except chickens do not need to be walked and aren’t really interested in playing fetch. And what they lack in terms of love and companionship, they easily make up for with their eggs, the unique, golden yolks of which are unmatched by the commercial imitators sold at your local supermarket.
Contrary to popular belief, chickens require a surprisingly small amount of space to roam — although the more you have, the better! Studies show that chickens raised on pasture or backyard grass, where they are free to roam and peck at worms and insects, produce eggs that are more nutritious, higher in beneficial omega-3 fatty acids and tastier than eggs from chickens raised on factory farms.
“They’re omnivores and will eat just about anything that comes out of the kitchen, including meat,” says Andrew Malone of Funky Chicken Farm in Melbourne, Florida, as quoted by the Green American.
Websites like BackyardChickens.com offer ready-made coops and all sorts of other resources to get you started on your journey to obtaining fresh eggs daily from your own backyard. Or if you’re feeling particularly handy and willing to take on a small project, building your own backyard chicken coop is another option that could save you money: http://www.backyardchickens.com.
Culture your own vegetables, dairy products and healing elixirs
If you’re noticing a trend here with food recommendations, it’s because proper nutrition is an absolutely essential component of long-term survival, especially in an “off-the-grid” situation where local grocers may or may not have a ready supply of food. And one of the best ways to maximize your nutritional input is to culture, or ferment, nutrient-dense foods using traditional methods, many of which date back centuries or even millennia.
More of an art than a science, the fermentation process not only allows for the extended preservation of food — fermented and cultured foods do not require refrigeration if properly prepared and stored — but it also unlocks key nutrients that simply cannot be attained from commercially prepared foods, including beneficial bacteria that maintain a healthy gut and promote optimal digestion.
“Getting started with fermented food and beverages is an important step to incorporating Traditional Diet in one’s home,” writes Sarah Pope of TheHealthyHomeEconomist.com, which contains more than 20 instructional videos and other resources on how to make things like yogurt, kefir (fermented dairy), kombucha (fermented tea), kvass (fermented beverage made from bread), kimchi (fermented vegetables), miso (fermented, high-protein seasoning) and much more: http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fermenting Foods by Wardeh Harmon, which is recommended by the Weston A. Price Foundation, is another excellent resource to get you started on your journey to culturing and preserving your own nutrient-rich foods at home: http://www.westonaprice.org.
Knit your own fabrics for making clothes, blankets
The availability of cheap clothing made by grossly underpaid workers at third-world sweatshops has become the norm in much of the developed world, obscuring the rich and artful histories of fabric production that have long sustained civilizations. Knowing how to knit a coat or blanket might not seem like much of a marketable skill in today’s globalized economy, but should the lights suddenly go out and the heat stop running, possessing such a skill could save your life.
Once you understand the basics of how to knit and create fabric, this powerful skill can be expanded to include the crafting of materials like rope, matting and even walls and roofing for shelter. Each of these items is essential to long-term survival, and knowing how to make them yourself is an invaluable skill that should not be underestimated.
The Homesteading Handbook: A Back to Basics Guide to Growing Your Own Food, Canning, Keeping Chickens, Generating Your Own Energy, Crafting, Herbal Medicine, and More by Abigail R. Gehring is just one resource out of many to this end. It also contains a wealth of other useful information for homesteaders, both urban and rural: http://www.amazon.com.
You can also access the free resource The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour, in PDF form at the following link: http://thehomesteadsurvival.com.
A while ago you had a chance to ask John McAfee about his past, politics, and what he has planned for the future. As usual, John answered with extreme frankness, with some interesting advice for anyone stuck at a checkpoint in the third world. Below you can read all his answers to your questions.
Travel tips? by timothy
John: You’ve had the chance to travel (sometimes in extraordinary circumstances!) through some very interesting places, and I’m wondering if you have as a result any concrete advice or suggestions to give about intelligent traveling.
– Do you have anything you’d consider unusual or otherwise notably every-day carry gear? – How do you keep documents safe / backed up / safe from prying eyes and fingers? – Are there places that, however adventurous you are, you avoid because you consider them too dangerous?
McAfee: As all of my close friends know, I have not always been a drug free citizen. Prior to 1983 I was a synthesis of corporate manager and drug dealer. The drug dealer profession took priority, and for a period of time that was my only occupation. Well .. taking the drugs that I sold also became a principal occupation. I gave up taking drugs and dealing drugs in 1983.
During my drug dealing days I became adept at those talents required of a successful drug dealer: clandestine travel through the Third World countries that produce and transport the goods; dealing with corrupt officials; dealing with drug lords and drug traffickers; successfully passing checkpoints; bribery, and in emergencies, the methods of escape.
In order to make the most of your travels, you need to first understand that, throughout much of the Third World, there is a smoothly functioning “system” in place that has evolved over centuries. From the First World perspective it is a “corrupt” system, but that’s not a helpful word if you want to acquire the most effective attitude for dancing with it. I prefer “negotiable”. It focuses the mind on the true task at hand when dealing with officialdom and removes any unpleasant subconscious connotations. So if you can view the following tools and tips as negotiation guidelines it will help bring the necessary smile to your face when the situation requires one.
Press Credentials
The most powerful tool a traveler can possess is a Press card. It will allow you to completely bypass the “documentation” process if you have limited time or limited funds and don’t want to deal with it. I have dozens stashed in all my vehicles, in my wallet, in my pockets, in my boats.
I am paranoid about being caught without one when I need one. They have magical properties if the correct incantations are spoken while producing them. A sample incantation at a police checkpoint (this will work in any Third World country):
“Hi, I’m really glad to see you.” (produce the press card at this point). I’m doing a story on Police corruption in (fill in country name) and I would love to get a statement from an honest police officer for the story. It’s for a newspaper in the U.S. Would you be willing to go on record for the piece?” You can add or subtract magic words according to the situation. Don’t worry about having to actually interview the officer. No sane police person would talk to a reporter about perceived corruption while at the task of being perceived to be corrupt. He will politely decline and quickly wave you through. If you do find the rare idiot officer who wants to talk, ask a few pointed questions about his superiors and it will quickly awaken his sensibilities. He will send you on your way.
The press card is powerful, but has risks and limitations. Do not attempt this magic, for example, at a Federale checkpoint in Mexico on a desolate road late at night. You will merely create additional, and unpleasant work for the person assigned to dig the hole where they intend to place you.
Documentation
Documentation is the polite word for “cash”.
The real art of producing documentation is the subtle play of how much to produce. In some countries, a policeman makes less than a dollar an hour. At a checkpoint, a policeman will usually share his proceeds with the other officers lounging by the side of the road and with the police Chief. The Chief will get about 25% in countries like Colombia and Panama, so if there are three officers total, then a ten-dollar contribution will end up with about $2.50 in each person’s pocket – a good take for someone making about a dollar an hour in legitimate salary.
Nothing irks locals more than someone who produces documentation in excess of what is expected. It ruins the system for the rest of the population. The Police begin to expect more from everyone, and the populace is then burdened beyond any sense of reasonableness. I might mention that checkpoints for any given location in most countries are set up no more than once a week, and frequent travelers reach accommodations with the authorities so that they are not unnecessarily burdened to the point that they are single-handedly putting the policeman’s children through school. The police are, by and large, honest people with hearts, and few truly abuse the system.
So to give more than is reasonable is a crime against humanity. The following are some hard and fast formulas that I have learned from trial and error over the years:
Documentation is inversely proportional to traffic density – the higher the traffic, the less you pay, the lower the traffic the more you pay. This is simple economics: The police must make their personal quota from whatever traffic there is.
If you stop at a checkpoint and there are four or five cars in line, you can be assured that less than a couple of dollars will be expected from a Gringo. Smart folks carry a half dozen cold cokes and beers in a cooler in the backseat and simply reach around, grab one or the other and hand it out the window with a smile. In the late afternoon on a hot day, this will be received with far more appreciation than a few small coins. If you hand a cold drink to all of the officers, you could easily talk them into giving you a protective escort to the next town.
In low traffic areas, in addition to having to pay more, you will also entail more risk. It’s never good to travel lonely roads in Central America, unless you are very experienced or closely wired in to the authorities. However, if you’ve come down to do a dope score or are determined to visit Crucita or her sister in some remote village and have no other choice, then strictly adhere to the following:
Do not get out of the car, even if ordered to do so. Your car is your only avenue of escape. It’s a ton or more of steel capable of doing serious harm to anyone foolish enough to stand in front of it, and once underway is difficult to stop. The checkpoint police in Central America never chase anyone down, in spite of years of watching U.S. Television and action movies. It’s too much work, plus they could have an accident. It’s not worth it for an unknown quantity. And they won’t shoot, unless you’ve run over one of them while driving off. It makes noise and wastes a round that they must account for when they return to the station – creating potential problems with the higher-ups. Not that I recommend running. It’s just that outside of the car you have lost the only advantage you have.
Smile and, if possible, joke. Say something like: “I’d like to stay and chat but I’m in a hurry to meet a girl. Her husband will be back soon.” This will go a long way toward creating a shared communion with the officers and will elicit a shared-experience type of sympathy.
Don’t wait for them to talk. Take the initiative. Have your documentation ready as you pull up and simply present it to the policeman while beginning your patter similar to the above, or whatever patter is comfortable for you. Never hand cash directly. Slip it in inside your insurance papers, or some other paperwork relating to your car or your journey, with about an inch of the banknote discretely sticking out. I use a Cannon Ixus 530 setup manual with the front and back cover removed. It’s small, light, and looks like it could be important paperwork for almost anything.
Remember: 50% of the police who stop you in most Third World countries can’t read. This is a powerful piece of information for the wise.
Once the officer has removed the banknote, which will be immediate, reach out and retrieve your laptop manual (or whatever you choose to use), smile, wave and drive off immediately without asking permission, but slowly, without looking back. Doing the job and leaving quickly without appearing to hurry off is the key here. Don’t give them enough time to assess you.
The above is a fail-safe formula for back roads of Central America if adhered to explicitly. Expect to part with at least 20 bucks. If, on approaching the checkpoint, you judge the police body language to be insolent or agitated, change the twenty for a fifty.
If something goes awry and the above, for some reason, has not worked, then pretend stupidity. Ask them to repeat everything they say and act bewildered. If ordered to get out of the car, smile broadly and simply drive off. Again – slowly.
If drugs or other contraband are planted in your vehicle by one of the police while another has your attention (a very common occurrence), understand, above all, that there is a zero probability that you will be arrested, unless you add to the “offense” by pissing someone off or otherwise acting unwisely. The intent is to scare. Under no circumstances deny that it is yours. Say something like “Damn, I thought I left that at home”, or “That’s the second time I’ve been caught this week.” This will show them that you are a good natured player and will probably negotiate. Denying ownership of the contraband will be seen as confrontational – an attitude that brings high risk when dealing with Third World authorities. The “documentation”, however, need not be much. They have chosen an approach to making a living that is universally considered by the locals as “not fair play”, and they should not be unjustly rewarded for it. Sure, they did go to the effort of distracting you, and someone had to go to the trouble to plant the dope, so they deserve something, but $5 is the maximum you need to pay. If they ask for more, then you can safely become indignant. They will shut up. The locals won’t tolerate police that take too much unfair advantage of the system, and your obvious awareness of the correct protocols will alert them to potential trouble if they push things.
If you actually are carrying contraband, of any kind – drugs, guns, Taiwanese sex slaves – whatever, and are caught, then the actions that you take within the first few seconds of discovery will have a profound impact on the rest of your life. The reality is: You have been caught. The officers have options:
1. Arrest you and charge you, where you are likely to confess to other people about exactly what you were carrying and how much – thereby limiting the policemen’s ability to make off with much of the cache. 2. Come to some arrangement with you that is mutually beneficial and that does not include your demise, or create any undue risks to the officers’ jobs or safety.
Option 2 is obviously preferable. To anyone not fond of prisons, that is.
Your first order of business is to assess your situation. If you are in a town or even near one with reasonable traffic driving by, then the chances of your demise, or incurring harm to yourself, are virtually nil if you keep your wits about you. If you are on a lonely country road, and there is only one officer, or even two, your risks could be high, so you will be handicapped in your negotiations.
On your side, you have the option to go to jail and tell your story to lots of people, which generally restricts the officers’ abilities to make money on the encounter – the higher-ups will take it. On their side, they have the guns, and threats. Ignore the threats. You are fully cognizant of the fact that their sincere hope is that some accommodation can be reached that enriches their pockets and allows you to leave the area without compromising them.
So — first things first. Smile. There is no circumstance under which a smile will handicap you when dealing with authorities.
Be friendly in your speech and immediately and fully acknowledge your situation, and theirs. This puts them at ease and sets the framework for negotiation. Be polite but firm. Let them know that they will not be able to walk off with your entire stash, and do this early on. It creates more reasonable expectations in their minds. If your contraband is drugs, offer them a small hit while talking. It re-enforces, subconsciously, the idea that the dope is your possession and that they are partaking due entirely to your good will. If you are transporting sex slaves, then I must say first that I cannot possibly condone your chosen occupation, but -offering each one of the policemen a taste of the goods may well seal the deal without any additional cash thrown in.
It’s important to be firm without any semblance of hostility. If the policemen tell you, for example, that they are going to confiscate all of the goods, then, with an apologetic manner that implies an unfortunate certainty, say “I’m sorry, but that won’t be possible”. Shake your head sadly as if you had divulged: “My mom just died”. And this is the point to present them with an absurdly low offer. If you are carrying 20 keys of cocaine or a half ton of marijuana, then offer them $50. Alternatively, you could offer them a one ounce bag of the weed or a gram or so of the coke. If it’s sex slaves, tell them they can look at the bare breasts of one of the least attractive women (in parts of Southern Mexico, this might actually be sufficient).
They will be taken aback at your offer, but it will place any unreasonable expectations they may have in stark perspective. As a rule of thumb, if you are near a populated place, you will ultimately settle by parting with an amount of cash equal to about 10% of the wholesale value of the goods. On a road with infrequent and unpredictable traffic, maybe 20%. If you are on a desolate road, especially if the body language is not comforting, you may have to bite the bullet, give them the entire wad, plus your car, and ask for a ride to the bus station. Don’t expect the police to accept the drugs or contraband as payment if you are near a populated area. They would obviously be seen transferring the goods to their vehicles. If you are not carrying sufficient cash, then you are unprepared, and shouldn’t be doing shady deals in Central America.
Never display fear or hostility. Smile throughout, and crack what jokes you can.
Name Dropping
Knowing the name of the country’s Police Commissioner and Armed Forces Chief, and the Chief of Police for each county or town you will be driving through can be very helpful. Knowing all the mayor’s names will not hurt any either. Name-dropping is a powerful tool in the Third World, especially for gringos, if used appropriately. Telling a cop in America that you are friends with the mayor or the police chief will seldom help you avoid a traffic ticket, and may even increase the charges. In Central America, offending a Police Commissioner will immediately get a policeman fired, with no repercussions to the Commissioner, and, depending on the offense, may even get the officer “erased”. So it gives an officer serious pause when you say: “The drugs belong to Commissioner (insert name). I am delivering them to a friend for him”. If spoken with authority and condescension, they can have a dramatic effect. No policeman in his right mind would try to validate the story. Resident Gringos, for odd reasons, are prized as friends by wealthy and prominent locals, so it would not be out of the question to be close with the Country’s Police Commissioner. If the cop asks any specifics, like, how you know the Commissioner, pull out your cell phone and say: “I have the commissioner’s number, why don’t we call him and you can ask him yourself.” You need to have solid self-assurance, or at least some large cojones, to pull this off, but in a tough situation this can work miracles.
A small amount of research is necessary before using this approach. You need to know, for example, whether the police commissioner is really dealing drugs (almost all are). Every local inhabitant in the country will know this information (there are no secrets in the Third World). The policeman will certainly know.
You don’t have to be doing something illegal in order to use the name-dropping approach. It should work under any circumstances: You have no money; You are in a hurry and cant waste the time to answer questions; you are bored and just want to f*** with someone — whatever.
Generally, the tactic of planting drugs on people is only practiced in heavily trafficked tourist areas. The police in tourist areas are handicapped because tourists generally don’t “pay their due” to the police, or to any other functionary. Tourists consider it “corrupt” to have to pay policeman to do their jobs, or to pay them in order to have the freedom to drive down the street on checkpoint day. The police therefore are forced to resort to unethical means in order to make a living in these places.
Gifts
Gifts occupy a different strata in the system of negotiation. They are used when some future consideration is required, or after an official favor has been provided. Gifts can be small or large, depending on the circumstances and the wise person will have an ample supply ready for any event. I operated seven small businesses in Central America and socked an ample supply of gifts:
Favors, likewise, are part of the system. They have no negative connotation, and they require offers whose magnitude reflects the magnitude of the favor.
One common “favor” that is considered questionable is to gift an officer in the armed forces to provide armed support for a drug deal, a revenge raid, an armored car heist, or similar function. It’s a very common occurrence but it’s deemed to be morally sketchy by most of the populace. The reason for this, I believe, is the sense of unease created by the image of highly organized, insolent, largely illiterate men with fully automatic weapons catering to the whims of anyone with spare change. The general consensus is that the system of “negotiation” should stop at the gates of the military. The military should uphold the system, not practice it, as my friend and philosopher Paz once said. This is nothing more illogical than policemen as “officers of the peace”. The fact that SWAT teams exist and every policeman carries a gun and is trained in violent tactics, should alert us to the fact that practicing peace is not the means of choice for maintaining peace.
If you take the above advice to heart you should enjoy your adventures heartily.
Book and Movie? by Anonymous Coward
Is Boston George still working on your biography? Have you thought about making your story into a movie? Who would you like to see play you, besides Charlie Sheen of course.
McAfee: George, as you probably know, is still in prison. Prison is an environment that abhors haste, and projects are drawn out for as long as possible so that the overwhelming amount of time on one’s hands can be efficiently consumed. I would expect the book to be out about the same time that George is out — in a few years, if it were being authored by him alone. There are multiple authors, however, each doing their part and I expect the book to be out shortly.
Warner Brothers has already announced a movie. The screenplay is based on the E-book by Josh Davis. Interesting story here: Josh Davis was approached by Conde Naste media June of 2012 and asked if he would be willing to write a story about me that could be turned into a movie. This was six months prior to the murder of Gregory Faul. Josh said yes and Wired Magazine, owned by Conde Naste, was chosen as the vehicle. Josh called me and asked if he could interview me for a Wired piece and I said “yes”. Had he told me it would be turned into a movie I would have said “no”. No one in their right mind would say “yes”. Movies require a number of elements in order to be successful. If your story does not have these elements, then they must be manufactured or inferred.
Josh came down and spent two weeks in Belize and a couple of days with me. Those couple of days has become “a significant part of a year” according to Davis’s resume today. He passes himself of as the “John McAfee” expert.
Impact Future Media is also doing a movie. I am co-operating fully with them, mostly because the CEO of the company, Francois Garcia, is Argentinian and I am too afraid of him not to co-operate. He is a nice man although not the sort of person you would want to piss off.
As to who should play me, I think we would all agree that Morgan Freeman is the obvious choice.
Google: Doing no harm? by globaljustin
Mr. McAfee, thanks for taking questions! My question: Do you consider Google in its current incarnation to be a “good company”? I ask in the context of revelations about the level of Gmail snooping, Google bus controversy, Google Glass failure, “only criminals want privacy”, Larry Page refusing to donate to charity, Google Maps interface changes, etc. You used to be in security, so applying that experience & your recent public issues, do you “trust” Google?
McAfee: Good God what a question. First and foremost: I don’t trust anything or anyone. I’m not remotely cynical, I’m just old and I’ve seen a lot. I trust people to be human, meaning all the weaknesses known to humanity exist in all of us. And everyone has a price. For some people it may not be money. It may be a daughter or a wife, which is why Cartel operatives are so fond of kidnapping family members. If someone sends you your daughter’s ear, then to get the other ear back with daughter attached you might happily betray all of your friends. If not that, then maybe it is your reputation, or your job, or torture, or even your life. Everyone has a price. It’s always something. If the previous two axioms are taken as given, then clearly, you can trust no-one.
Companies are even worse. They have all of the weaknesses that humans possess (they are made up of humans after all) and absolutely none of the virtues. They are a derivative of profit, and profit is amoral.
Is Google good or bad. It’s good, because all of the information in the world is now at my fingertips, thanks to Google. It’s bad because it wants to track me and invade my privacy so that it can increase its profits. It’s good because it has streamlined the world around us and caused unimagined efficiencies. It’s bad because it co-operates with agencies that don’t have our best interests at heart. It’s good because it has created astonishing new industries. It’s bad because it controls the rankings of those industries and uses it’s own beliefs to moderate that ranking. It’s good because it allows me to make my own decisions about events rather than having to rely on the news and other media. It’s bad because the delivery of such information can be, and is, listed in ways that one opinion or the other can be highlighted. Etc. It’s good for Google stockholders. It’s bad for any competitor’s stockholders. It’s good for the realtors who rent or sell Google their needed office space. It’s bad for everyone else because rents go up. I hope I’ve answered your question.
Why didn’t you ask Intel to rebrand before? by sandytaru
Seems like if you didn’t want to be associated with the software, you could have asked them to remove the name years ago.
McAfee: I did.
Any advice for Peter Norton? by HornWumpus
what advice would you give to Pete to get his name off the second worst software on the planet?
McAfee: Yes. Grow a beard.
Re:Belize by Anonymous Coward
Has there been any new developments or investigation into the fire that burned down your compound? Do you still maintain the government was involved? Since there was never charges brought against you in the murder case, would you go back?
McAfee: The fire was never investigated. Investigation as a method of solving crimes is a novel idea that has not yet caught on in Belize, or much of Central America for that matter. Police investigators are engaged primarily in uncovering indiscretions within the general population for which they can demand money for keeping their mouths shut – an intricate and beautiful art that reached its zenith with incarnation of J. Edgar Hoover here in in America.
What does happen, and it seems to work reasonably well, is that when a crime is committed, a random person who everyone believes should belong in jail is arrested. Sometimes more than one. If the person or persons, does not have an airtight alibi, such as being in attendance at some other jail during the time of the crime, or performing at a live concert with hundreds of people watching during the time of the crime, then the person, or persons, is charged and generally goes to jail. Exceptions are relatives and friends of powerful people who are never charged for anything under any circumstances, even if an entire town witnesses them engaging in any illegal act, including murder. Local judges are instructed in how to decide cases by the most powerful person in the town and it all seems to work smoothly and efficiently. In the case of the fire that consumed my property, a woman who was a neighbor of mine was arrested. She is a nice lady who happened to refuse the advances of the local political party representative and was chosen for discipline. I refused to press charges and she was released.
Of course the government was involved. And of course I would never go back.
Re:Belize by Anonymous Coward
Whatever happened to your girlfriend Samantha? Why didn’t she leave the country with you after running from authorities?
McAfee: Within a few days of my exit from Guatemala she was happily engaged in the monumental task of seducing every male, and female, in Southern Guatemala. It was an extravagant objective and one which, given the population density of the region, had a limited chance of success, I felt. I ran the numbers by her but she tirelessly kept at this task, with no letup. She entertained me throughout with her stories and outrageously effective pickup lines. While she was thus entertaining herself I hired lawyer after lawyer to get her a visa with no success. Ultimately we mutually agreed to abandon the pursuit, whereupon she moved back to Belize and, with perseverance and courage, began the same process with Orange Walk district as her objective. There is some slight probability that she could succeed. After it was over I tattoo’d her name on my back, along with the name of total stranger who I met in the tattoo shop – and who I have not seen since.
Drug Cartel by Anonymous Coward
I saw yesterday in USA Today that you were on the run because a drug cartel had a $600,000+ hit on you. If you got out of the business of doing and dealing drugs in the ’80s, why are the drug cartels still interested in you?
McAfee: For yourself, and anyone else who chose not to read the USA Today story (I don’t blame you, I also only read headlines in newspapers), this is the answer:
While I chose to get out of the drug business, the Government of Belize has not so chosen. My problem with the government is not drugs, but the fact that I uncovered rampant corruption of all kinds throughout the Government. The government is closely associated with cartels and has limited pull outside of Belize. So asking the Cartel to help them is a reasonable solution for them.
“Buy Belize” ads by Ungrounded Lightning
An observation more than a question, but feel free to comment (especially if you have information on the subject). Starting shortly after your Belizian adventure I’ve noticed a rash of radio advertising, touting Belize as a tax haven and secure retirement site for those with substantial assets, and trying to sell land to them. These adds always strike me as funny. Since their authorities went after you, has Belize suffered a sudden drop in interest as a “safe haven” for the retiring well-off, or perhaps an exodus of others already there?
McAfee: Belize hired a Colombian based tourism crisis management firm, among other things they have been buying mass advertising in print, tv in order tochange their image.
Additionally they started an official rumour that I was a good thing for Belize, ever since I came into the news, real state has boomed in the country… we tracked down the original source of that press release and was issued by Remax Belize.
This is all I know.
Device Technology / Licensing by pariah99
Hey John, I ended up spending a week sailing with friends in Belize last year over summer vacation – lovely place! We actually ended up sailing with a skipper who used to work with you, and he told me you had some wild times together! We didn’t spend a lot of time together, but he left a huge impression on me and my sailing buddies. Unfortunately, he very recently passed away, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Okay, that’s a bit besides the point, so on to my question: I was seriously wondering on what kind of technology your device incorporates. Does it use existing technologies like Tor, or is it based on a new protocol. If it’s a new thing, is the technology dependent on a number of exit nodes a la Tor, or does it depend on the number of peers using the software in order to obfuscate identifying information. In either case, will you consider releasing the software side of things under an open license?
McAfee: The captain’s name was Freddy Waite. The finest skipper that ever sailed. He could tell jokes and stories all day long and the tougher the sailing conditions the more fun he had. I’ve probably spent a thousand hours at the helm with Freddie, talking or just sitting together in silence. He was my full time captain for four years. It was a sad day for me when he recently died.
As to the technology — at this point, for competitive reasons, we are not discussing it. The rumor that it was a gift to me from aliens, is, however, totally false. However, our first privacy application is out on Google Play as of 3 days ago. It is called DCentral1. With DCentral1, you can see what information installed applications have been granted access to. One touch starts a scan that scores apps based off of their requested uses. It will tell you which apps listen to you by accessing the phone’s microphone, which apps watch you using the built in camera and video capabilities, which apps are reading your e-mails and text messages, which apps are sending messages or emails without alerting you, etc. You will be shocked at the results of a scan, I can guarantee you. You can customize the score value for each permission and receive a score tailored to your preferences. You can determine which applications you want to continue to trust after the scan. Those you distrust will be removed if you so choose.
With DCentral1, our goal is to offer more freedom to users through awareness. Information is currency in the digital age, and it’s important to know what information (and to whom) you’re giving away. DCentral1 is available for free on Android, and we hope to have it available on iOS in the near future!
Can gov backed spyware last in the wild? by AHuxley
We have seen huge efforts by contractors to sell malware with key logging or tracking to different govs using deep insights into consumer OS over many years. With quality AV efforts from around the world and more realtime networked behaviour analysis who is winning the dissident watching game?
McAfee: As always, the battle tilts first one way then the other. If your question is: “Will there ever be an ultimate winner?”, the answer is no. The same tools are available to each side, just as soon as one side steals the newer tools from the other side, so there is no way for either side to maintain the upper hand. The white hats have the advantage of numbers, support and the fact that they can co-operate openly. The dark hats have the advantage of relative anonymity and the never-ending support of dissatisfied people everywhere.
Politics? by Anonymous Coward
Did anyone from the GOP contact you about Obamacare or were they just using your name. Have they talked to you about running for office or has your stance on Snowden turned them off? Would you consider running as a third party candidate?
McAfee: The attorney for the House Ways and Means Committee contacted me and asked if I would help. I said “no”. I would never run for office, neither would I want to be in office, of any kind. I would rather drive a nail through my foot.
The Florida State’s Attorney for the Orlando region, Jeffrey Ashton, yesterday released his conclusion at the end of a 10-month investigation into the FBI slaying of Ibragim Todashev, a suspected witness in the Boston bombing case, saying that he will not be prosecuting the agent. Ashton ruled that the killing, in which the agent, at the end of a nearly 5-hour May 21 interrogation in Todashev’s Orlando apartment, fired seven bullets into Todashev, killing him justifiably, after being attacked.
However the evidence submitted to Ashton’s office by the FBI, the local coroner’s office and his own investigators, on examination, actually leads to a different conclusion from the one of justifiable homicide which he, and the FBI in its own internal probe, have reached.
For one thing, the two accounts of what happened offered by the FBI agent who shot Todashev, and by a Massachusetts State Trooper who was also in the room at the time of the shooting, are significantly at odds.
Why should we care about the FBI slaying of a Russian Chechen immigrant during an investigation into a Boston murder case? Because, as I wrote recently in Counterpunch magazine, Todashev was actually also a close friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two brothers suspected of being the Boston Marathon bombers. The FBI had started investigating Todashev a day after the bombing when it learned he was a friend of the elder brother, but perhaps were more interested in preventing him from talking about what he knew than in learning what he had to say.
First a scene setter: According to all witnesses who came onto the scene after the shooting, Todashev’s body ended up in a foyer leading to the front door from the apartment’s living room, where the interrogation happened, his feet pointing to the front door, and his head and shoulders on the floor in the living room. He was found positioned face down by an investigator from the local Medical Examiner’s office lying there on top of a red broomstick, a point made by every witness to the scene.
The Massachusetts State Trooper, in a May 29 interview with FBI internal investigators of the shooting, explains that stick in his account of the shooting. He says that late in the evening, towards midnight, Todashev had begun to confess to having been involved in a 2011 triple murder in Waltham, Mass., which the a Massachusetts prosecutor was investigating, and had agreed to write a confession, when he suddenly yelled, flipped the table he was writing on at the FBI agent questioning him, and raced towards the front door. He says Todashev, a martial arts expert, ran toward the door, but then “grabbed a rod, approximately five-foot-long pole that was lying against the wall near the door,” and then “raised the pole in his hands kind of with both hans which appeared to me to be a trained fighting position and charged me as if he was going to impale me with the pole.”
At that point the trooper says he heard shots fired from his right as he was standing in the living room facing the charging Todashev, and “saw Todashev make two movements which indicated he had been injured by the shots. “He fell to his hands and knees, and then, almost instantly, he sprang forward, coming up in a fighting stance. I heard more shots and he fell to the ground, this time apparently incapacitated.”
But the FBI agent who shot Todashev has a different story. Interviewed a day earlier in the course of same FBI investigation, he says Todashev was just at the point of writing out a confession and continues:
“I was reading my notepad when I heard a loud noise and suddenly felt a blow to the back of my head. I was knocked partially off my chair but I caught myself. I saw Todashev running past me and I tried to grab him. I removed my weapon from the holster and aimed the gun at Todashev, who had run towards the kitchen (actually a kitchen unit separated from the living room area by a waist-high counter). I shouted ‘Show your hands!’ I saw the trooper to my left, but didn’t know if he had his weapon. I stood in the middle of the room and saw Todashev partially in the kitchen. I constantly yelled for Todashev to show me his hands, but he did not comply. I heard the sound of metal banging together like knives in a very hurried fashion. I believe that Todashev was trying to retrieve a weapon and that he was successful in doing so. Todashev instantly ran at full speed from the kitchen towards me and the trooper. I saw Todashev’s left shoulder drop as he rounded the corner from the kitchen to the living room. It was obvious that Todashev was in an attacking pattern.”
He continues:
“In the split second available to me to assess the threat posed by Todashev’s wholly non-compliant actions I was in fear for my life and the life of the trooper. In order to stop the threat I shot Todashev three to four times. Todashev fell backwards (my emphasis) but did not go to the ground. He then re-established his footing and suddenly rushed toward us. I then shot him three to four more times in order to stop his clearly deadly threat. This time, Todashev fell to the ground face first and I believed the threat had been eliminated.”
These two tales don’t work together of course. Either one taken alone, if true, would certainly justify the shooting of the suspect, but when they diverge so wildly — in one version Todashev remains in the foyer, and grabs the red broomstick, while in the other he rummages through a drawer in the kitchen and evidently finds a weapon, presumably a knife — it’s a red flag that something’s amiss.
And when the only two eye-witnesses to this killing, only a week after the event, cannot get their stories straight, we have to assume that something is badly wrong with the whole scene.
It’s also worth noting that an expert from the Medical Examiner’s Office, who arrived only at about 2 am on May 22 almost two hours after the shooting, was prevented from entering the room until an FBI unit, which had arrived at 12:30 am, shortly after the agent shooting of the suspect, had finished “documenting the room.”
If the FBI’s agent were telling the truth, there would be no broom handle lying under Todashev’s dead body. Perhaps “documenting the room” meant slipping that rod under Todashev’s body?
On the other hand, if the Massachusetts State Trooper was telling the truth, how did Todashev get shot three times in the back and once in the top back of the head — a shot that the Medical Examiner says would have immobilized him instantly?
It is agreed by most witnesses, including those outside the apartment, that the sequence of shots was three and then four. According the Medical Examiner’s report, two shots hit Todashev in the arm. One hit him in the chest near the right nipple, which perforated the left ventricle of the heart and the aorta. And two hit his left upper arm, also from the front — one a bullet that re-entered the chest cavity and also perforated the left ventricle.
The head shot was clearly among the last or the last shot to hit Todashev, as it would have caused his total collapse instantly, according to the Medical Examiner. Yet if Todashev were first shot as he was charging the trooper, running through the foyer from the direction of the door with his arms raised holding a broomstick, the shots hitting him would have had to come from the front. That would necessarily be the one shot to the chest, which perforated not just his heart, but his aorta and esophagus, plus the two shots to the left arm, one bullet of which also ricocheted hitting his left ventricle. That would explain Todashev dropping to his knees, but makes the claim that he rose again and attacked hard to imagine. The aorta, remember, is the main artery out of the heart carrying blood to the body under maximum pressure. Ruptured, it causes an almost instant precipitous and debilitating drop in blood pressure. But even if Todashev somehow managed through sheer will to rise from his hands and knees and charge his antagonists again after those grievous wounds, how did the three subsequent shots end up hitting his back?
We could imagine the head shot if he were charging low down, but not the other three bullets to the back in that scenario.
Meanwhile, back to the agent’s quite different account. He claims Todashev, not armed with a five-foot pole, but with whatever he succeeded in finding in a kitchen drawer, was shot as he ran at the agent and staggered backwards, clearly indicating that he had been hit from the front. Again we had three shots, so it had to be the chest and the left arm. Now he “rights himself” and charges forward again, taking four more shots. But these, remember, are all either into the back, near the centerline of the body, or into the top of the head. The head shot couldn’t have been number one in the second volley, because that would have been the shot that dropped him. So what would have caused his body to turn around exposing his back?
Never mind. The FBI investigators (who have managed to exonerate 150 out of 150 agent shootings of suspects and witnesses over the last 18 years) managed to conflate the two accounts, subtly shifting each, and changing some of the witness statements, to create one smooth “alternative reality” in which the shots all fit together nicely.
Here’s the FBI’s summary of what happened, in a document provided to the Medical Examiner and the State’s Attorney’s Office by the Bureau:
“When Todaschev ran to the kitchen he frantically grabbed at the counter but came out empty handed and instead grabbed a long metal pole, similar to a mop handle next to the kitchen.”
And the shooting itself? From the FBI internal investigation, as provided to the State’s Attorney on a “do not share” basis:
“He flipped the table he was writing on which was believed to have struck BS SA [the Boston Special Agent] in the head and ran to the kitchen. Todaschev was heard frantically grabbing items in the kitchen and reappeared in the doorway wielding a long metal handle of a mop or broom. He took an attack stance with the weapon, [Special Agent BLANK] issued verbal commands, to which Todaschev did not comply, and violently lunged towards SA and MSP Trooper . Having already been wounded and fearing for his safety, [Special Agent] fired 3-4 rounds striking Todaschev. Todaschev went down on his knees momentarily then “sprang” to his feet and launched to attack again. [Special Agent] fired another 3-4 rounds dropping Todaschev to the floor. SA fired seven shots in total, Todaschev was hit seven times with fatal shots to his head and piercing his heart. He was instantly incapacitated and died on the scene.”
There are so many things wrong with this merged and massaged account it is hard to see how Florida State’s Attorney Ashton could have accepted them, but he apparently has. Firstly, Todashev wasn’t just “heard” grabbing items in the kitchen, he wasvisible over the countertop, according to the agent’s initial report of the incident. And in that initial account he never grabbed that broom handle, which the trooper said had been leaned against the front door jamb, not “next to the kitchen.” In any case, the trooper never said anything about Todashev going into the kitchen area, but rather had him running straight to the front door for the stick. He also claimed Todashev had fallen on hands and knees, not just his knees, while the agent had him staggering backwards, not falling forward.
State’s Attorney Ashton’s office declined to take a call asking for a chance to ask questions about his report.
A key witness in this case was never questioned. That is Khusen Taramov, who even the two agents and two state troopers who went to Todashev’s home to interrogate him agree was there for most of the evening, being kept at bay from the interview by a local Orlando FBI agent known to Todashev and his friends as agent “Chris.” Taramov had said on several video interviews including one with a local television station, that he had gone to the apartment at the request of Todashev, who wanted him around when the agents came, as he suspected “something bad” might happen to him.
He reported that Agent “Chris” had kept him in the parking lot from 7:30 to 11:30, talking about meaningless things (a claim the agent supports in his own interview). Then, according to Taramov, “Chris” told him he had to leave, and, as I wrote earlier, accompanied him in his car to a remote restaurant, then calling another car to return to the scene. When Taramov himself, concerned about his friend, drove back, arriving after midnight, he found a crime scene and Todashev dead.
He wasn’t questioned by Ashton because when he went back to Russia to attend Todashev’s funeral he found upon trying to return to Orlando that the FBI had gotten him barred from re-entry to the US, despite his having a valid Green Card and no criminal record. He is only one of many Todashev friends and family members who were driven out or deported from the the US by the FBI and ICE following Todashev’s slaying, rendering them all unavailable for questioning.
Taramov’s unavailability to Ashton, assuming the State’s Attorney really wanted to conduct an independent inquiry, is a critical issue. This is because it gets to the question of why, if the FBI was investigating Todashev, who was a close friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston bombing suspects, only one agent was in that apartment doing the questioning, along with a state trooper. The FBI always works interviews and interrogations in pairs because the agency doesn’t tape interviews. It has the interrogating agent fill out a Form 302 report, and the second agent witnesses the interview and signs the first agent’s write-up verifying it as accurate.
Perhaps, as the troopers claim, this was all about their case — a three-year-old unsolved triple murder of three small-time drug dealers in Waltham in which Tsarnaev, and possibly Todashev, was a suspect. But if that was the case, why was the FBI doing the questioning and not a trooper? The FBI had been investigating Todashev as at least a witness in the Boston Marathon bombing. Indeed one document sent to Ashton’s office by the FBI is from the Supervising Agent for the case, who is listed as being the supervisor of the Tampa Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Suspiciously, the troopers too didn’t seem too concerned about documenting their interview of Todashev. They say they brought along a JVC recorder, but its battery ran out of juice well before the confession, and just when they claim Todashev was getting to the good stuff in his alleged “confession” prior to allegedly writing it down, one of the two troopers in the room, who said he had been recording the session on his cell phone as a backup, turned off the recording function and went outside to use his phone to call the Massachusetts Assistant Attorney on the murder case “for instructions.”
So there is no confession, oral or written, except for the word of the trooper and the FBI agent who witnessed and participated in Todashev’s slaying.
As for that fatal head-shot, the FBI claims, in its investigation into its agent’s shooting of Todashev, that everything comports with the official merged story of how the shooting went down. Indeed, they write:
“The Chief ME advised the trajectory of the head and shoulder wounds, the combination of the seven entrance wounds to include the paths of the bullets, were inconsistent with other possible scenarios. First, due to the extreme downward trajectory of the wounds to the head and upper shoulder were inconsistent with the shooter being behind Todashev as if Todashev was running away. Rather, those extreme downward trajectories could have occurred when Todashev had his back to the shooter, only if:
1.) Todashev leaned backwards at a severe angle toward the shooter; or
2.) Todashev was standing below a shooter who was above him; or
3.) Todashev was shot while both he and the shooter were prone on the floor.”
They left out one other possibility, though: namely that Todashev, who fell face forward in the foyer, with his head and shoulders ending up protruding inside the living room, was shot by the FBI agent one more time, with the agent firing that final shot from his position five to 10 feet into the living room, straight into the back of Todashev’s head.
Aspartame has been renamed – AminoSweet – and is now being marketed as a natural sweetener
Aspartame, the artificial sweetener linked to cancer, heart palpitations, seizures, weight gain and other severe medical issues, is now going by the name AminoSweet. The toxic sweetener, Aspartame, has been around over 25 years after it was accidentally discovered by chemist, James Schlatter while working for the drug company G.D. Searle & Company. It was created as an anti-ulcer pharmaceutical drug, but the chemist discovered it had a sweet taste, so the drug company switched its application to the FDA from a drug to a food. It was none other than Donald Rumsfeld, who was the CEO of Searle who pushed for Aspartame to be sold on the market in 1985. If that name sounds familiar, your right, he is the same Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense who served under George W. Bush. He is a perfect example of someone taking advantage of the “revolving door” between our government and corporations.
AminoSweet is Aspartame, it changed its name to fool the public, and I am guessing it did so because consumers figured out that their product made them sick. Aspartame is made up of three chemicals: aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and methanol. The book Prescription for Nutritional Healing, by James and Phyllis Balch lists aspartame under the category of “chemical poison.”
WARNING! Read labels before buying foods with the name Phenylalanine. I will go one step further — if you need to bring along a chemistry book to the store in order to understand the ingredients on the labels — DO NOT BUY IT!
Phenylalanine is an essential amino acid (that is, an amino acid which our bodies cannot make and which we must obtain from our diet). It is also one of the amino acids which is used to make aspartame. Phenylalanine is found in all protein-containing foods including milk, cheese, eggs, meat and fish.
Products which contain aspartame have a label which says ‘Contains a source of phenylalanine’. This label is there to help people with a rare inherited genetic disorder called phenylketonuria (PKU). These people cannot metabolise phenylalanine from any source and need to follow a strict diet to control their intake of this amino acid. The disorder affects approximately 1 in 10,000 babies, and is identified by screening shortly after birth. [Source]
Ten percent of this sweetener contains methanol. When it is absorbed by our intestines, it breaks down into formic acid and formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is a deadly neurotoxin that causes cancer, retinal damage, interferes with DNA replication and causes birth defects.
I went to the AminoSweet website to see what kind of “spin” they are putting on their repackaged product to entice shoppers to buy their so-called “natural” sweetener and here is their selling point:
AminoSweet aspartame is the low calorie sweetener that tastes just like sugar. It is made from two building blocks of protein just like those found naturally in many everyday foods. Aspartame is digested by the body in exactly the same way as these other protein foods and so does not bring anything new to our diet.
Makers of this artificial sweetener claim it is made from protein found “naturally” in many everyday foods. So what is the meaning of ‘natural’ when it comes to the labeling of food? The FDA’s website writes:
“From a food science perspective, it is difficult to define a food product that is ‘natural’ because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth. That said, FDA has not developed a definition for use of the term natural or its derivatives.” [Source]
The word ‘natural’ is being thrown around to describe all sorts of genetically modified foods and AminoSweet is genetically modified. There is nothing natural about it. Why do you think these drug companies buy patents? They create them in a lab and they own it. And they know exactly what they are doing and choose to fool consumers into thinking their foods are safe when science proves differently.
In June 2013 Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and Campbell’s Soup became defendants in class action lawsuits that allege they misrepresented the nature of the ingredients on their product labels. The Campbell’s Soup Company is currently being sued by Florida residents for misrepresenting the genetically modified (GMO) corn in its soup as “natural.” Ben & Jerry’s decided to stop using genetically modified ingredients as a result of their suit.
Ben & Jerry’s used to be known for their healthy ‘natural’ ice creams, but I guess when they sold out to British-Dutch conglomerate Unilever, they sold their souls along with it. It looks like they haven’t updated their website since the sale either, even though Unilever has owned them since 2001. They portray themselves as another American success story — but according to the lawsuit, they are just another corporation choosing to deceive the public — much like another American success story — Monsanto who purchased Searle & Company in 1985– who make Aspartame now called AminoSweet.
The comical geniuses over at College Humor recently released a new short video that is capturing the attention of many across the internet due to its comedy, but even more so due to its factual backing. The 4 minute video takes us through the history of the engagement ring, a material good that so many of us now both associate and expect as a “symbol of love.” The video shows us how this now commonly accepted viewpoint was molded into all of us by nothing more than an advertising campaign by the diamond juggernaut De Beers. Check it out:
Science fiction novels and films, historically speaking, provide writers and directors with imaginative vessels for social commentary. And even though they are always a reflection of the idiosyncrasies and anxieties which permeate society in the present, they do, on occasion, manage to predict something about the future with startling accuracy.
Previously, we’ve looked at the degree to which Orwellian projections of a dystopian future have come true, particularly fears about the misapplication of technology as a means of oppressing the general public. Another set of issues that science-fiction auteurs of the past have managed to predict relates to the proliferation of genetically modified, factory produced food.
Consider Richard Fleischman’s cult-classic film Soylent Green (1973), which was an adaptation of Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966). The story takes place in New York City in the year 2022. The world is in shambles. Overpopulation, abject poverty, depleted natural resources, scarce food, and general demoralization and desperation, have all created for a world that is fraught with tension. Things are especially bad in NYC, where the population totals around 40 million. The general public has become entirely dependent upon the Soylent Corporation, who disperse food rations. Their latest advance is a product called Soylent Green, which is said to be made chiefly of plankton, and is also said to be more nutrient dense than any of the company’s earlier products. Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) is a NYPD detective who is tasked with investigating the mysterious death of a man who, we learn, discovered the grim secret about Soylent Green. Soylent Green wasn’t made from Plankton…but from human remains.
Within the context of these speculative fiction narratives, it all sort of makes sense in a macabre way. Post-World War II science fiction commonly depicted future societies which struggled with both population surpluses and food shortages. Thanks to Soylent Green, accidental cannibalism has become something of a trope unto itself.
The recent film Cloud Atlas(2012) dealt with a similar theme. The film was directed by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski’s (the latter of whom are clearly not strangers to making thrillers with subversive undertones, having made The Matrix series and V for Vendetta). The film skips around quite a bit, historically and geographically. The story begins with a violent voyage along the South Pacific during the 1800’s, and addresses mounting fears about nuclear proliferation in the seventies, and ends up showing a dystopian vision of the future wherein people are routinely “recycled” to make food.
The issues, in both real life and the classic science fiction tropes, have everything to do with the scarcity of resources. As natural resources are depleted, governments resort to ethically dubious practices at mass scale. What is somewhat comforting today is that companies who offer more ecologically friendly alternatives are gaining traction in the marketplace. In terms of nutrition and agribusiness, there have been several alternative farms sprouting up all over the country, and some smaller farmers have even become confident enough to take legal action against Monsanto. In terms of eco-friendly energy consumption, solar energy is becoming increasingly common in the United States, and in Canada you can even find alternative eco-friendly energy plans through various informational websites that can let consumers bypass the main fossil-fuel based providers altogether.
What’s especially chilling about these stories, though, is that they do offer interesting comments about the current crises surrounding agribusiness – particularly with all of the stories in recent years about the Monsanto corporation’s destructive tendencies. While there’s no disputing the fact that government farm subsidies and agriculture becoming subservient to major fast food corporations has created a lot of problems, some degree of responsibility falls on consumers. It is critical, now more than ever, that we consume conscientiously…lest we desire a future society wherein people subsist exclusively on human flesh.
Anonymous has released the bombshell new video report below on Illuminati billionaire Jacob Rothschild’s connection to the missing Malaysia Air 370 flight that has been missing for nearly a month now. Sharing information totally classified by the mainstream media, Anonymous busts the MH370 mystery wide open.
Videos have sprung on YouTube alleging that the US private security service formerly known as Blackwater is operating in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk. Western press is hitting back, accusing Russia of fabricating reports to justify “aggression.”
The authenticity of videos allegedly made in downtown Donetsk on March 5 is hard to verify. In the footage, unidentified armed men in military outfits equipped with Russian AK assault rifles and American М4А1 carbines are securing the protection of some pro-Kiev activists amidst anti-government popular protests.
The regional administration building in Donetsk has changed hands many times, with either pro-Russian protesters or pro-Kiev forces declaring capture of the authority headquarters. In the logic of the tape, at some point the new officials appointed by revolutionary Kiev managed to occupy the administration, but then – as the building was surrounded by angry protesters – demanded to secure a safe evacuation.
This is where the armed professionals come in. The protesters, after several moments of shock, start shouting, “Blackwater!,” and “Mercenaries!,” as well as “Faggots!,” and “Who are you going to shoot at?!” But the armed men drive off in the blink of an eye without saying a word.
Surely these men were not Blackwater – simply because such a company does not exist anymore. It has changed its name twice in recent years and is now called Academi.
The latest article on the case, published by the Daily Mail, claims that though these people did look like professional mercenaries, they conducted the operation too openly.
“On the face of it, the uniforms of the people in the videos are consistent with US mercs – they don’t look like Russian soldiers mercs. On the other hand, why run around in public making a show of it?” said DM Dr Nafeez Ahmed, a security expert with the Institute for Policy Research & Development.
“I think the question is whether the evidence available warrants at least reasonable speculation.”
Ahmed also added that “Of course the other possibility is it’s all Russian propaganda.”
Why would Russia need to make such provocation? The Daily Mail explained that “any suggestion that a US mercenary outfit like Blackwater, known now as Academi, had begun operating in east Ukraine could give Russian President Vladimir Putin the pretext for a military invasion.”
Other western media outlets are maintaining that a “Russian invasion” has already began, because the heavily armed military personnel now controlling all major infrastructure in Crimea are “obviously” Russians.
Armed men march outside an Ukrainian military base in the village of Perevalnoye near the Crimean city of Simferopol March 9, 2014.(Reuters / Thomas Peter )
The Daily Beast media outlet went even further. On the last day of February, it published an article alleging that “polite Russians” in Crimea are actually…employees of Russian security service providers.
While there are indeed several military-oriented security service providers in Russia, it however appears highly unlikely that all of them combined could provide personnel for such a wide-scale operation.
At the beginning of the week, Russian state TV reported that several hundred armed men with military-looking bags arrived to the international airport of Kiev.
It was reported that the tough guys are employees of Greystone Limited, a subsidiary of Vehicle Services Company LLC belonging to Blackwater/XE/Academi.
Greystone Limited mercenaries are part of what is called ‘America’s Secret Army,’ providing non-state military support not constrained by any interstate agreements, The Voice of Russia reported.
But they are not the only ones. A Russian national that took part in clashes in Kiev was arrested in Russia’s Bryansk region this week. He made a statement on record that he met a large number of foreigners taking active part in the fighting with police.
He claimed he saw dozens of military-clad people from Germany, Poland, and Turkey, as well as English speakers who were possibly from the US, Russkaya Gazeta reported earlier this week.
Was Peaches Geldof murdered by the illuminati and the Knights of Malta for exposing pedophiles just months ago? Peaches, daughter of legendary rocker Bob Geldof, had recently tweeted the names of two mothers who had offered their babies to be raped by an alleged illuminati member who later admitted to the crimes after being outed by Geldof.
For those who don’t know Geldof, she was considered the ‘Paris Hilton’ of the UK, and she was highly involved in exposing pedophilia in the illuminati realm. She also faced charges for exposing a prominent UK pedophile on Twitter as shared in the videos as screenshots below. BeforeItsNews videographer pressResetEarth clearly proves in the first video below that Peaches untimely death has all the tell tale signs of being an ‘illuminati hit’.
All evidence shows that a massive cover-up surrounding flight 370 has taken place, likely implementing U.S. military factions
INDIAN OCEAN (INTELLIHUB) — It’s now been 30-days since Malaysian Airlines flight 370 went missing after departing from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) on route to China and search and rescue teams have still found no trace of the Boeing 777 aircraft or any of its 239 passengers, after being fed botched search area data by Malaysian officials.
In fact, it has been reported that family members of the missing believe that the Malaysian government is involved in a massive cover-up of what really took place on Mar. 8, after the aircraft’s transponder was manually overridden via human intervention. Moreover, Malaysian authorities have suspiciously failed to release the plane’s cargo hold manifest and actual cockpit voice recordings which have been repeatedly requested by various family members, investigators and search and rescue teams to aid in the search for the missing plane.
Now according to Sara Bajc the girlfriend of Phillip Wood, a missing passenger aboard flight 370, there is a general consensus amongst flight 370′s family members, based in Malaysia, that possibly a U.S. militarized faction may have intercepted and commandeered the airliner. In fact, Bajc even stated that there is some witness to two fighter jets accompanying MH370 after the flight went dark, evading radar.
“I am sure that the military in Malaysia knew that plane was there and has tracked that plane in some way. Now whether they were in control of it or not we don’t know. Many people are saying that the United States is involved […] but the general thinking across the families here and even non-families […] believe this was a military operation of some sort.”, said Bajc, demonstrating her true inner feelings.
So what do we know?
Based on radar data supplied from several other countries and early on reports, we know that MH370, under intelligent human control, turned-back to the west at about 1:21am on the morning of Mar 8., just after the planes transponder was shut off. It was then reported by Intellihub News that the plane then took a zig-zag course heading Northwest toward the Straights of Malacca and the Andaman Islands where it was later intercepted on radar by a Malaysian and military installation. However, the Malaysian military, press and government quickly covered up the leaked report. Then 10-days later officials in Thailand released their radar data willingly, which matched the leaked original leaked Malaysian military radar blips putting MH370 just North of Malaysia before turning to the South. Interestingly, Thai officials claim that no one ever asked for their radar data, that’s why they willingly submitted it 10-days after MH370 went missing.
New information obtained by CNN Sunday, tells us that “flight 370 may have been flown on purpose along a route designed to avoid radar detection”, signifying a highly contrived and likely militarized plan to commandeer the aircraft, its cargo, and 239 passengers. Shockingly this information dovetails with a report by Shepard Ambellas titled YouTube investigator: ‘Flight 370 landed at Diego Garcia military base, plane and passengers then put in a Faraday style hangar’ which was released on Mar. 24, detailing how flight 370 was spotted by locals flying low over the Maldives Islands between 6:15am and 6:40am on the morning of Mar. 8, the day flight 370 went missing. This sighting was also independently confirmed by American investigator John Halloway, after interviewing an eyewitness living on the island of Kudahuvadhoo, via telephone, who saw the massive white jumbo-jet bearing a red and blue stripe down its side. The eyewitness testimony also revealed that the plane was flying “Northwest to Southeast”, which would have set the plane up for a backdoor westwardly approach to U.S. military base Diego Garcia avoiding all sightings from any straggler base personnel on the remote island in the Indian Ocean.
Moreover, investigators also determined that out of 5 simulations that were loaded into the captain’s home flight simulator, one was of Diego Garcia. The police confiscated the flight simulator from the pilot’s house in Shah Alam and reassembled it at the police headquarters where experts are currently conducting checks.
“The simulation programmes are based on runways at the Male International Airport in Maldives, an airport owned by the United States (Diego Garcia), and three other runways in India and Sri Lanka, all have runway lengths of 1,000 metres. We are not discounting the possibility that the plane landed on a runway that might not be heavily monitored, in addition to the theories that the plane landed on sea, in the hills, or in an open space,” an unnamed source told Berita Harian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKM7q56OQSw
Intentional diversions and distractions
Since the disappearance of flight MH370, loved ones of missing passengers have been on an emotional roller coaster ride as the mainstream media and the governments involved with the search continue to create diversions and spread false information. Two weeks ago, the Malaysian government claimed to have found wreckage of the missing aircraft. Their information came from a satellite search crew, but was not verified. Based on this flimsy evidence, the Malaysian government was quick to announce that the wreckage had been found and that everyone on board the plane had been killed. This information was callously passed on to the loved ones of missing passengers through a standard text message from the government.
Malaysian officials claimed that the mystery had been solved and seemed to be celebrating the terrible news that the plane was found in pieces. However, the announcement of the crash was made prematurely and soon after it was discovered that the large masses detected in the ocean were just large swaths containing junk and trash, but no airplane.
After weeks of false alarms and wild goose chases the Malaysian government said that the plane may never be found, but the vast majority of the passengers family members refuse to believe the official story.
As of now, 30-days into it, the current goose chase is locating the black box “ping” that has allegedly being detected somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
The head of the multinational search for the missing flight recently told CBS News that two electronic pulses were picked up by a Chinese ship, which could be the missing planes black box. However, it was later admitted that the reports in question were published before they were verified, expanding the endless rabbit hole of propaganda for onlookers to get lost in. While reports of the black box pings have yet to be verified, they continue to get constant mainstream media coverage.
The contents of flight 370
As of now the motive for such an elaborate crime is not yet fully known.
What we do know is that 20 employees from the multi-billion dollar Austin Texas-based tech firm Freescale Semiconductor along with one IBM executive were aboard the flight.
Adding to the mystery, the Lord Jacob Rothschild (Blackstone Group) controlled Freescale Semiconductor Ltd. has kept the flow of any information regarding their employees at a minimum.
The Voice of Russia reported on Mar. 31 in an article titled MH370 kept hidden at top-secret US military base – media reports:
Interestingly, that leading innovative company [Freescale Semiconductor Ltd.] has been oddly unwilling to provide information on the missing people. Only the nationalities of the employees were made public: 12 of them were from Malaysia and eight from China. However, Freescale has persistently declined to release their identities. “Out of respect for the families’ privacy during this difficult time, we will not be releasing the names of the employees who were on board the flight at this time,” Freescale spokeswoman Jacey Zuniga said.
Nevertheless, Mitch Haws, Freescale’s vice president, described them as “people with a lot of experience and technical background,” adding that “they were very important.” According to Reuters, the vanished employees were engineers or specialists involved in projects to streamline and cut costs at key manufacturing facilities in China and Malaysia.
While it had been reported previously that 4 of the Freescale Semiconductor employees aboard flight 370 were patent holders, their names did not appear on the official flight manifest released by the Malaysian government, adding even a deeper element for independent investigators.
Even the mightiest have their come-uppance when their internal logic spews out destructiveness returning on the self—“blowback” in a way perhaps not seen before. I refer to James Risen’s extraordinary article in the New York Times, “Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater,” (June 30), in which the customary meaning of “blowback” refers to policies, e.g., the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, the “pivot” of military power to the Pacific intent on the encirclement, containment, isolation of China, produce unintended, or if intended, still unwelcome, consequences for the initiator of the policy or action.
I have already discussed the mass killings in Nisour Square, Baghdad, in a previous article. Now we learn that this was part of a pattern in Blackwater’s behavior—again, Risen’s reporting. Even for one who is a seasoned critic, it is painful for me to write about. Organized thuggery knows no limits particularly when working for the highest authority, immunity from punishment worn as a badge of honor, as meanwhile government officials hide their eyes. Risen writes, “Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: ‘that he could kill’ the government’s chief investigator and ‘no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,’ according to department reports.” A private contractor threatens the life of a State Department investigator! No reprisal, punishment, cancellation of the contract, not even disclosure of the threat—yet Blackwater still in place years later, as part of the silence on atrocities in the Obama-Hillary era.
It’s time to demand an end to the cover-up of the leading cause of breast cancer – tight bras.
