Mr. Fish: Dark Matter

From his utterly unumbrageous blog, Clowncrack. Click on the image to embiggen:

Charts of the day: Divisions over spookery

Two charts from a new survey by the Pew Center for the People & the Press on the impact of the National Security Agency’s massive domestic spying operations.

First a look at how folks look at the leaks and the leaker:

Next, How they feel about possible snooping on their own lives:

A video reminder: Iran, repression, & the U.S.

Lisa J. Radcliffe, a UC Berkeley graduate who now practices family law in Pleasant Hill, found herself in a unique role at a unique moment of 20th Century history — examining documents seized after student activists seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran on 4 November 1979, triggering the Iran hostage crisis [still celebrated in Iran] and setting the stage for Ronald Reagan’s first political dirty trick.

While Radcliffe is currently working on a memoir of her experiences titled Pebbles in the Rice [SLYT], she appeared on a 1979 episode of Alternative Views [previously], the long-running public access program created by University of Texas, Austin, philosopher Douglas Kellner and Frank Morrow.

The story she tells is an important reminder of some of the many reasons Iranians hold less-than-fond views of the American political system.

The program notes, via Alternative Views’ You Tube channel:

In a stunning and emotional powerful program, an Iranian poet and political dissident vividly describes his incarceration and torture at the hands of the Shah’s police — SAVAK. Additionally, Lisa Radcliffe, who recently returned from an extensive trip to Iran, relates her experiences. She also shows the State Department documents which the students holding the hostages gave her, documenting CIA involvement and counter-revolutionary activity of the U.S. which continued right up to the takeover of the embassy.

Living in Torturing Dictator Shah’s IRAN after CIA Operation Ajax – Two insider’s Views

Quote of the day: Their motive is vengeance

Convicted spy Christopher Boyce, sentenced to 40 years in federal prison in 1977 for selling NSA secrets to the Soviets [a tale told in Robert Lindsey’s brilliant 1979 text The Falcon and the Snowman, in an interview with Peter Shadbolt of CNN:

Do I think the government wants revenge against Snowden? Absolutely, they want revenge. They want to ensure anyone who even thinks about doing what he did does so with fear in their hearts.

With respect to these agencies wanting to protect the interests of the states they serve, I ask this question: Is it in the interest of the United States and the American people to have billions of their communications secretly monitored by a government? And to have Congress lied to about it? I don’t think that’s in the interest of the American people. Is the interest of the United States government the same as the interest of the American people? Not always. Not in this situation, anyway.

Of course, there’s still a lot that has to be played out. But I think that revenge is the key driving force by those individuals who stand to get into a heap of trouble as a result of these secrets being made public — the big shot bureaucrats in the national intelligence community. Not that it’s in the interest of the American people to be kept in the dark about it, but simply because of the repercussions those individuals behind the scenes could face. They could be retired early, or lose their pensions, or be disgraced, or be hauled in front of Senate subcommittees, or all manner of bad things. I’m sure there are many things the NSA and CIA don’t want the public to know about, principally because the players behind the scenes could get into serious trouble if it became known.

Read the rest.

Headlines of the Day: Culture wars to spookery

The biggest news of the day, from EUoserver:

EU-US trade talks to start after France wins culture clause

From the London Telegraph, a word of alarm about the rising titan:

Fitch says China credit bubble unprecedented in modern world history

China’s shadow banking system is out of control and under mounting stress as borrowers struggle to roll over short-term debts, Fitch Ratings has warned

From the Oakand Tribune:

Is Bay Area housing bubble back?

From The Independent:

‘The worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Galileo’: Scientists call for drugs to be legalised to allow proper study of their properties

From International Business Times:

Cannabis Comes To Wall Street: The Next Big Industry?

From Deutsche Welle, some Obama flattering by German imitation:

Der Spiegel: Germany to expand Internet surveillance

From The Age:

Australia gets ‘deluge’ of US secret data, prompting a new data facility

Facility hints at Australia’s involvement in data collection.

And then there’s this, from c/net:

NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls

National Security Agency discloses in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.

From Bloomberg News:

Hong Kong People Oppose Returning Snowden to U.S., Poll Shows

One sign of Hong Kong sympathy can be seen in this Saturday report on a demonstration of support there for the controversial leaker of NSA secrets.

Orwellian Revisualization: An earphoned overlord

From Nerdcore:

Via Google translation from the German Nerdcore original:

I fixed Shepard Faires Obama-Poster to fit PRISM. Also: Happy 64th, George Orwells 1984!

I’ve updated Shepard Fairy’s Obama poster for the year 2013. I’ve even seeing eye in place of Obey Giants Signet packed into the lower left corner, so that’s really consistent.

RAP NEWS returns: Whistleblower

After a five-month hiatus, Robert Foster is back with a new, star-studded episode JUICE RAP NEWS [previously] featuring Edward Snowden, journalist Glenn Greenwald, Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg, and more, dealing with the issue de jour.

From the You Tube program notes and credits accompanying the video:

Rap News 19. It started off as a slow news day, and a routine update on the state of the Free World Order with NSA Director General Baxter. But then the news broke of startling revelations from the fearless paladin of adversarial journalism, guardian of civil liberties, journalist Glen Greenwald, concerning a shadowy spying program called PRISM. Who is behind these revelations, and how should we view them? How will the Authorities, and the Corporations implicated, respond? Join Robert Foster for a whirlwind summary of the events in this ongoing saga…

- Written & created by Giordano Nanni & Hugo Farrant in a suburban backyard home-studio in Melbourne, Australia – on Wurundjeri Land.

** SUPPORT the production of new episodes of Juice Rap News, an independent show, by making a donation:
http://thejuicemedia.com/donate
– private – Gratitude to our donors whose generosity has made this episode possible.

Jeff Danziger: A Message from the Post Office

A First Class idea from a great editorial cartoonist [his web site]:

Monsanto as the pioneer of the New Ownership

If you farm Monsanto’s genetically modified crops, you don’t own them — as farmers quickly learned when they did what farmers have done since the first furrow was plowed, namely, planted some of last year’s harvest seeds in this year’s fields. Then they discover that they only leased the right to grow and sell one season’s crops.

In other words, farmers no longer owned seeds. Rather, they leased them and were denied the right to replant because the crops contained patented self-reproducing intellectual technology.

What an incredible discovery: You could appear to sell some thing while retaining actual ownership — including the right to lend, lease, or sell the product in question.

In one generation, the farmer had been transformed from an independent producer into a dependent corporate semi-serf.

It was nothing less than a counterrevolution, a return to a sort of feudalism.

But the same thing happens already with recorded music, entertainment, and books — transformed from physical objects like vinyl, CDs, DVD, reels of film, audio- and videotape, and bound volumes into packets of digital data reproducible only as leased rights operating on proprietary platforms. Buyers cease to be owners, and lose the right to freely sell or trade what they think they’ve bought.

The more dependent we become, the more restrictive the rights.

Media customers, like farmers, have been transformed from owners to renters, all because the artificial construct that is the corporation, operating in cahoots with banksters, hopes to claim ownership of quite simply everything.

Once in a while people catch on. . .

Here’s an example, from Chris Suellentrop of the New York Times:

Microsoft has proposed limiting players’ ability to resell games that will be made for the Xbox One, due in stores in November. Companies that create games for Xbox One, Microsoft said, will be able effectively to prevent consumers from reselling the games by ensuring that the resold games no longer function on the console. No companies that create games have yet indicated that they will exercise this right.

This controversy led to the odd spectacle on Monday: At an industry event devoted to new games, there was raucous enthusiasm for the untrammeled right to sell and purchase old games.

Microsoft is promising new experiences with the Xbox One, which will require a constant Internet connection, because hundreds of thousands of machines in the cloud will enhance an individual console’s computational power. But players seem to be hearing only what is being taken away by Microsoft’s online monitoring of their gaming: the ability to resell or give away your games to whomever you choose, whenever you choose.

Read the rest.

But Microsoft is going Monsanto one better. The product you leased keeps track of your every mood and move.

From Benjy Sarlin of MSNBC:

Edward Snowden told the Washington Post last week that he leaked the National Security Agency’s top secret surveillance programs in part because he feared the Internet becoming “a TV that watches you.”

What to make, then, of an Internet-connected household computer that requires users to install a futuristic microphone and camera able to track their movement—and even heart rate and mood—in pitch black?

The device in question is Microsoft’s Xbox One, the much anticipated gaming console hitting the market this holiday season. And while its features promise an unprecedented level of interactivity for gaming, they’re fueling concerns among gamers that they could be used to spy on the family living room.

Read the rest.

What a corporate wet dream!

And since the Xbox One links online with a whole network of users, what a wonderful way for the folks at the NSA to a watchful eye on users.

The Germany’s data protection commissioner sees it as a surveillance device, as noted in this video from GS News:

Monsanto must be jealous.

Three takes on the NSA eavesdropping scandal

First up, James Bamford, one of America’s finest investigative journalists, and he’s devoted boundless energy to exposing the actions of the super-secret National Security Agency, the most powerful intelligence agency in the nation’s history.

In an interview by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now!, Bamford places the NSA revelations in context, and the picture is scary indeed.

A Bamford quote from the video:

Well, you know, the interesting thing here is that the administration, and particularly the NSA, has been coming out with all these charges against China going after our secrets, our information, and so forth. It’s caused the Congress to give enormous amounts of money to NSA, this money for defensive use against the Chinese and so forth. What never comes out is the U.S. offensive capability against the rest of the world. The U.S.—there’s nobody that can even compare to the U.S. We’ve got an enormous Cyber Command. They’re expanding NSA’s secret city by a third to accommodate 14 new buildings, 10 parking garages, a new enormous supercomputer center—all this for this new, very secret Cyber Command. And it’s dedicated largely to offensive, to creating wars, not preventing wars.

A full transcript is posted here.

The program notes:

As the U.S. vows to take “all necessary steps” to pursue whistleblower Edward Snowden, James Bamford joins us to discuss the National Security Agency’s secret expansion of government surveillance and cyberwarfare. In his latest reporting for Wired Magazine, Bamford profiles NSA Director General Keith Alexander and connects the dots on PRISM, phone surveillance, and the NSA’s massive spy center in Bluffdale, Utah. Says Bamford of Alexander: “Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign, or the depth of his secrecy.” The author of “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America,” Bamford has covered the National Security Agency for the last three decades after helping expose its existence in the 1980s.

He told you so: Bill Binney talks NSA leaks

A retired 32-veteran on No Such Agency offers RT America his own take on the scandal, and what he sees is truly Orwellian:

The program notes:

In the wake of multiple leaks regarding the data mining programs PRISM and Boundless Informant, whistleblowers are coming out in droves to talk about the unprecedented government surveillance on the American public. RT Correspondent Meghan Lopez had a chance to sit down with NSA whistleblower William Binney to talk about the latest developments coming out of the NSA case. Binney is a 32 year veteran of the NSA, where he helped design a top secret program he says helps collect data on foreign enemies. He is regarded as one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history. He became an NSA whistleblower in 2002 when he realized the program he helped create to spy no foreign enemies was being used on Americans.

Moyers & Company: Big Brother’s Prying Eyes

Finally, from Bill Moyer’s PBS show Moyers & Company, a discussion between Moyers and Lawrence Lessig, professor of law and director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

An excerpt form the program notes, beginning with Lessig’s take on an account by NSA whistleblower and current fugitive:

“Snowden describes agents having the authority to pick and choose who they’re going to be following on the basis of their hunch about what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. This is the worst of both worlds. We have a technology now that gives them access to everything, but a culture if again it’s true that encourages them to be as wide ranging as they can,” Lessig tells Bill. “The question is — are there protections or controls or counter technologies to make sure that when the government gets access to this information they can’t misuse it in all the ways that, you know, anybody who remembers Nixon believes and fears governments might use?”

Few are as knowledgeable about the impact of the Internet on our public and private lives as Lessig, who argues that government needs to protect American rights with the same determination and technological sophistication it uses to invade our privacy and root out terrorists.

“If we don’t have technical measures in place to protect against misuse, this is just a trove of potential misuse…We’ve got to think about the technology as a protector of liberty too. And the government should be implementing technologies to protect our liberties,” Lessig says. “Because if they don’t, we don’t figure out how to build that protection into the technology, it won’t be there.”

Headlines of the day: Troubles here and there

From ANSAmed:

Labor: Eurozone loses jobs, Greece tops list at -2.3%

First-quarter 2013 data shows Greek employment -6.5% over 2012

From El País:

Cuts to healthcare spending putting Spaniards’ lives at risk, report finds

Austerity kills is the message of a study published by the ‘British Medical Journal’

And the inevitable good news/bad news story, from Reuters:

Euro zone inflation subdued as employment keeps falling

And from Greek Reporter, a sign of that old hobgoblin of small minds:

IMF Stands By Its Mistakes

From Keep Talking Greece, a report on the latest fallout from the Samaras government order to shut down the state broadcasting network:

News blackout: Greek media on strike until June 17/2013 in solidarity with ERT

And from Euronews, a warning to the Greek regime:

ERT closure risks toppling Greek government

From Time:

More People Have Cell Phones Than Toilets, U.N. Study Shows

From The Guardian:

Smith & Wesson gun sales hit an all-time high in year after mass shootings

At six-month anniversary of Newtown shooting, guns manufacturer reports its sales are up 43% over last year

And, finally, this ominous news, also from The Guardian:

Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate and energy shocks

NSA Prism is motivated in part by fears that environmentally-linked disasters could spur anti-government activism

Quote of the day: Bugging? Some already knew

Or such is the suspicion of Steve Sailer, writing in Taki’s Magazine about, among other things, the practical implications of the last intrusive espionage revelations:

One lesson to be learned is: Don’t use email, text messages, or anything else that leaves a digital trail. Face-to-face communications offer less legal danger, because in court who can remember exactly who said what?

Perhaps that explains something about the mysterious failure over the last couple of decades of what used to be called the Information Superhighway to decentralize elites. We were all promised that in the Age of Cyberspace it wouldn’t matter where we lived. No more having to live near an expensive, crowded city. Freedom!

Instead, it turned out that three metropolitan areas–New York, Washington, and San Francisco/Silicon Valley—became far richer, while much of the rest of the country got poorer.

Read the rest.

Headlines of the day II: All about the Benjamins

From EUbusiness:

Biggest European groups are big in tax havens: NGO

From Reuters:

EU justice chief seeks answers on U.S. data spying

From El País:

Europe faces up to impotence over US’s mass spying program

From EnetEnglish:

Greece downgraded to emerging market status

From Grist:

BP stops cleanup in three Gulf states — and starts funding a new beachfront hotel

From Improbable Research, reporting on the UN-approved list of recommended edible insects for our Brave New Diet:

Anyone for fried lice?

And from The Independent, good news for Berkeley bioengineers and their corporate sponsors:

Exclusive: The agricultural revolution – UK pushes Europe to embrace GM crops

Environment Secretary will urge EU to relax restrictions on crop licensing

A backhanded paen to the bankster brigade from the New York Times:

Banks Seen as Aid in Fraud Against Older Consumers

And finally, from Sociological Images, another reminder of who the real winners are:

The Top 1% of US Income-earners Receive 15% of Tax Breaks and Credits

Headline of the day: Orwellian, with bonus video

From Salon:

“1984” sales explode following NSA scandal

And 1984—The Video, from Bernie Sanders, America’s only socialist U.S. Senator, speaking to the Senate floor:

Obama’s patron and the fate of the free press

University of Chicago Law School Professor Geoffrey Stone played a critical role in the creation of the legalistic covert neoliberal politician that is Barack Obama, for it was Stone who brought Obama to his campus as a constitutional law professor. Obama brought him onto his advisory team during his 2008 campaign.

In this Democracy Now! debate with former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief Cris Hedges, Stone makes a critically important point about Obama: Whatever he does is accomplished with a Con Law prof’s finesse, with all the requisite whereas-es and wherefores. Thus, what he does is — moral, immoral, or otherwise — certain to pass the scrutiny of legislatures and a Supreme Court which hews to the neoliberal line, a doctrine that arose from a cadre of scholars from — where else? — the University of Chicago.

Obama has bested Bush in his zeal to kill messengers, initiating more whistleblower prosecutions than all previous administrations combined, and Hedges makes the critical point that without whistleblowers, the press has no way of reporting on government’s darkest sides.

Relevant here, a quote from Jeff Bachhman, lecturer in Human Rights at the School of International Service at American University, writing for The Hill’s Congress Blog:

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has charged six whistle-blowers, a term apparently not in The New York Times’s or The Washington Post’s editorial vocabulary, under the Espionage Act. These six individuals have revealed government waste, fraud, and abuse, acts of aggression, torture and war crimes. Yet, it is those who have revealed the criminal activity that have suffered prosecution by the Obama administration while those who actually committed the crimes have gone unpunished.

>snip<

The Obama administration has sent a clear message. Government officials and journalists who wish to work together to create news stories through the leak of classified information that portray the president and his administration in a positive light should have no fear. And to the journalists and whistle-blowers thinking about publishing that other kind of classified information, be prepared to have your emails read, your phones tapped without your knowledge and your life and career turned upside down.

Read the rest.

And now for the debate:

The program notes:

Edward Snowden’s decision to leak a trove of secret documents outlining the NSA’s surveillance program has elicited a range of reactions. Among his detractors, he’s been called “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison,” (Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker), who’s committed “an act of treason,” (Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee). To supporters, Snowden is a hero for showing that “our very humanity [is] being compromised by the blind implementation of machines in the name of making us safe,” (author Douglas Rushkoff), one whom President Obama should “thank and offer him a job as a White House technology advisor,” (American Conservative editor Scott McConnell). We host a debate with two guests: Chris Hedges, a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times; and Geoffrey Stone, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Stone served as an informal advisor to President Obama in 2008, years after hiring him to teach constitutional law.

Keiser Report: Bugger Bilderberg, Brit breakdown

The latest episode of the Max and Stacy show begins with a denunciation of the Obama administration’s spooky obsession and a discussion of a veritable bugger’s Bilderberg. The second half features an interview with Mark McGowan, whose epic rants are featured at The Artist Taxi Driver.

The program notes:

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert ask, “What is Boundless Informant, PRISM, Trans-Pacific Partnership, SOPA, PIPA and ACTA if not copyright prostitutes colluding and beating up the competition? Max also informs President Barack Obama that a food stamp is NOT a job. In the second half, Max talks to artist, Mark McGowan (aka The Artist Taxi Driver), about his pushing the pig to Downing Street as an artistic response to the privatisation of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. They also discuss McGowan’s crowd-funded film currently in production, “This is Not a Recession, It’s a Robbery!”

Headlines of the day: Shape of things to come

From ANSAmed:

Crisis: austerity leads Greeks to obesity, experts say

From InvestmentWatch:

Dust Bowl Conditions Are Literally Returning To The Western Half Of The United States

From MacroBusiness:

Chinese economy slowing fast

From Alternet, more proof of Barack Obama’s real priorities:

Obama Nominates America’s Biggest Walmart Cheerleader as His Chief Economic Adviser

From Le Temps via PressEurop, yet another twist on the spooky news:

PRISM Scandal: ‘Government espionnage a new threat for Swiss banks?’

Chart of the day: Spy away, majority says

From a new report by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press:

Drone operator’s lament: ‘We see everything’

Here’s a clip from NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel’s Today Show interview of Brandon Bryant, who was credited with more than 1,600 kills during his five years former Predator drone operator.

Bryant says his suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of his experiences:

Bryant recalled his first traumatic experience in a 14 December 2012 interview by Spiegel’s Nicola Abé, describing what happened after he laser-painted a target and a fellow operator fired a Hellfire missile at a mud house in Afghanistan half a world away from his New Mexico video screen:

“These moments are like in slow motion,” he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.

With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.

Second zero was the moment in which Bryant’s digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.

“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.

“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.

“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.

Read the rest.

Headlines of the day: Spooks & buggery edition

From EU Business:

EU ‘concerned’ by US surveillance revelations

From EUobserver:

Germany most snooped EU country by US

From New Europe:

Time for Europe to stop being complicit in NSA’s crimes

From a St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial:

PRISM and BLARNEY mean it’s time to rein in the terrorcrats

From The Guardian, reporting the predictable responses:

Obama deflects criticism over NSA surveillance as Democrats sound alarm

Tech giants object to suggestions that they allowed government direct access to data while details of Prism program emerge

And equally predictable, this from the Electronic Frontier Foundatiuon’s Deeplinks:

Government Says Secret Court Opinion on Law Underlying PRISM Program Needs to Stay Secret

From ProPublica, matter of factly:

No Warrant, No Problem: How the Government Can Get Your Digital Data

From Forbes, a shoulder shrug:

Intelligence Chief Says Massive Data Collection Is No Big Deal, But Reporting It Is

From McClatchy Newspapers, another acknowledgement:

Phone record fury just one sign of how privacy is a thing of the past

And from the “strange bedfellows” department, this from Politico:

Glenn Beck, Michael Moore call Edward Snowden a hero

But another, more sinister take from the London Daily Mail:

Intelligence officials overheard joking about how NSA leaker should be ‘disappeared’ after handing classified documents to press

From the New York Times, no surprise:

Leaker’s Employer Became Wealthy by Maintaining Government Secrets

And from GlobalResearch, a reminder:

Spying on Americans before 9/11: NSA Built Back Door In All Windows Software by 1999

UPDATE: A final headline, from an announcement by Emisoft:

USA to legalize rootkits, spyware, ransomware and trojans to combat piracy?