Tag Archives: surveillance

China Cancelling Christians On The Web

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Pravmir.com

Christian websites in China have been suspended as new digital content regulations take effect.

The measures, which require internet users who wish to post religious content to obtain a permit, were introduced in March in an attempt to regulate religious content posted online. The Christian charity Open Doors says the move is “tightening the screws on China’s churches and Christian media.”

A licence is only available for state-approved religious institutions such as the Three Self Patriotic Movement and Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

Open Doors says: “The goal is to further limit the scope of public sharing of faith and to force all religions to align with Chinese socialism.”

Unknown devices…..

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Unknown devices keep showing up under network adapters in my device manager. I keep disabling them and they keep showing up.

They have no signature, no device ID or function, no location or vendor information. They just have the word root and then a number.

Then there’s the comment link on which I accidentally clicked that took me to an empty website. Was someone tying to download something or find my IP address?

My computer got very buggy and slow yesterday. Then my security software keeps turning off.

Worse, there are the unknown devices of my fellow man.

Someone sent me an email at which to contact them. The handle was something like city-slicker@usa.com (not the actual handle, of course).

Now do high-profile people usually have emails with such handles,  and, even if they do, do they give it out to strangers on the web?  Do they insist on contacting you and then insist that you respond only on personal email and private cell numbers?

And then do they comment on this blog using a fake handle?

One with a link on which I accidentally click that takes me to an empty website set up a long while ago?

Methinks I smell a set-up.  Especially when the high-profile one claims to have intelligence contacts/experience.

I could be wrong, of course. In which case, my profound apologies.

But that is why I do not respond except in ways I choose.

And that is why I like to keep it strictly about politics, except for people who have actually intersected with me.

Even then, I tend to be wary.

Anything a stranger needs to tell me can be posted at this blog.

If it’s confidential and has some public importance, disguise the information and post pseudonymously.

If it’s private information, please find a personal friend in whom to confide.

It does you, the reader, and me, the blogger,  no good to confuse web-reality with real-reality.

The Guardian Stages Surveillance Theater

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Image Credit: Saving the republic

The Guardian is running a piece by Trevor Timm, of the Greenwald-Poitras-Snowden- associated Freedom of the Press foundation. (H/T to Scott Lazarowitz, LRC)

It’s about Stingray, a technology that lets the government locate and track you via cell-phone tower signals.

Timm  is correct to point out the privacy implications of the NSA’s meta-data collection, which has filtered down to local police departments.

Meta-data is data about communications that doesn’t include the actual content.

It’s the date, the address (from and to), the length of time, the location.

Very rich, if collected continuously.

All very well, but, as even Timm does admit in the Guardian, this technology has been around for a couple of years.

Yet, last year, in a piece at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Timm wrote:

A few months ago, EFF warned of a secretive new surveillance tool, commonly referred to as a “Stingray,” being used by the FBI in cases around the country.”

Secretive and new? Really?

The Louisville Law Review says the Feds used the Stingray from 2006 on.

[The Stingray is really a brand that refers to a family of technologies, says the Review.]

Local police departments were using the Stingray as early as 2007 (seven years ago).

“Oakland’s Targeted Enforcement Task Force made 21 ”Electronic Surveillance [StingRay] arrests” in 2007, 19 in 2008, and 19 in 2009 for charges including robbery, kidnapping, attempted murder and homicide. Further records show employees receiving up to 40 hours in training on the technology.”

This was discussed in the major media, at least as far back as 2011.

At the cyber- security blog, Schneier on Security, a commenter in January 2013, called the Stingray “very old technology.”

And the Stingray is now old and very expensive technology, I’d actually be more woried by the likes of pocket picocells that hackers cobble together from COTS equipment for less than 200USD. “

A spy technology for under 200 bucks?

I’d be more worried by picocells too.

So, why isn’t the Guardian?

Or the EFF?

Or the Freedom of the Press Foundation?

UK’s Cinderella Law: Jail for “Emotionally Abusive” Parents

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The United Kingdom, already one of the most heavily surveilled states on earth, has decided that spying on its citizens with street cameras, shop cameras, cell-phone software, GPS tracking, email snooping, financial audits, welfare agency monitoring, and neighborhood snitches is simply not enough.

It wants to poke its nose into family life.

As usual, the pretext is a humanitarian one – the protection of children from abuse at home.

But child protection laws already punish physical/sexual violence and neglect of any kind severely.

So what’s left?

Now, parents face jail-time for convictions for emotional abuse, which can be anything from fighting in front of their children, blaming their children, being cold to them, or not paying enough attention to them.

Emotional abuse is real. And it is damaging.

But it’s also dynamic, complex and definitely not something a government official should meddle in.

Imagine the thousands of decent, loving families that are going to be ripped apart and destroyed by this malign law, as The Independent rightly points out:

“These days, parents who smoke or drink alcohol in front of children risk being characterised as child-abusers. Opponents of the tradition of male circumcision condemn Jewish and Muslim parents as abusers of children. Health activists denounce parents of overweight children for the same offence. Mothers and fathers who educate their children to embrace the family’s religion have been characterised as child abusers by anti-faith campaigners.”

Educating people about family interaction is one thing.

But there’s  already plenty of that going on.

What this law does is empower yet another empire-building department to pile up parental scalps in its quest for budgets, clout, and public profile.

Meanwhile, kids who tattle on their parents are losers too. They face the trauma of losing their parents to jail; losing their family life to endless days in court; and losing their own selves to a web of foster homes and government offices.

This isn’t a Cinderella law.

It’s a Cruel Step-mother (government) Law.

Telegraph.co:

“Changes to the child neglect laws will make “emotional cruelty” a crime for the first time, alongside physical or sexual abuse.

The Government will introduce the change in the Queen’s Speech in early June to enforce the protection of children’s emotional, social and behavioural well-being.

Parents found guilty under the law change could face up to 10 years in prison, the maximum term in child neglect cases.

The change will update existing laws in England and Wales which only allow an adult responsible for a child to be prosecuted if they have deliberately assaulted, abandoned or exposed a child to suffering or injury to their health.”

Once again, this is not about protecting children.

It is about giving the government the tools to intervene on behalf of  the “politically correct” agenda, which is the mask under which censorship of potentially disruptive political speech takes place.

It’s not about protecting a child who has sexual identity (or other) problems from harassment and cruelty.

Laws against physical abuse already do that.

It’s about using the accusation of “bigot,” “homophobe,” or “sexist” to jail human beings who are otherwise law-abiding citizens.

It takes no great imagination to see how universal surveillance plays into this.

Surveillance allows the government to surreptitiously target the people it wants to harass through analysis of their online activity, cell phone conversations, purchases, and social networks.

The guidelines for what constitutes a public threat have already been drawn up.

Provocateurs, agents, and civilian snitches, embedded in schools and welfare agencies, will then monitor the child of the  targeted person for investigation, coercive interviews, and direct threats.  Few children can stand up to such tactics.

Whatever they admit under pressure  then becomes the platform for a full-scale intervention into the targeted family.  Then follows jail-time, shrink sessions, and re-education camp  for the unlucky parent/s, whose entire private life now becomes public criminal record.

Criminalizing ordinary behavior and intimidating law-abiding citizens with an amorphous and expansive law is as good a way as any of politically gelding a large chunk of the population, hitherto beyond the reach of the criminal justice system.

Google’s “Hummingbird”: IP Theft & Mind-Control

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Google’s new search algorithm Hummingbird adds to the company’s sinister reputation among privacy advocates.

Google’s creepy Google Glass didn’t help it either.

Now comes Hummingbird, the biggest algorithm change in the search engine in twelve years.

“Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words,” Sullivan reports. “It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that ‘place’ means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that ‘iPhone 5s’ is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.”

(“Hummingbird is Google’s biggest algorithm change in 12 years,” WebProNews,  Sept. 28, 2013)

Simply put, Hummingbird is about Google trying to find the holistic meaning behind the individual words of a search-string (the query or series of words you input into the search function),  or, in the case of websites, the overall intent behind the key-words most used.

Bottom-line: Google is trying to figure out what’s going on in your mind when you type out certain words.

That is terribly similar to an area of research dear to the defense and spy agencies – predictive software and technology.

For instance,  DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is very interested in developing the cognitive footprints of users for identification purposes.

The goal is to bypass the need for passwords, which tend to be cumbersome for users and vulnerable to password-cracking, phishing, social-engineering, memory failures, and hardware theft.

“Software biometric modalities” are to be used to develop what it terms Active Authentication.

Anyone can see how useful the new Hummingbird algorithm would be to DARPA.

Indeed, given Google’s prior collaboration with the CIA in the monitoring of social media, it wouldn’t be surprising if Hummingbird has also come out of a joint project with the government.

The defense agencies come up with the technology to figure out what random “bad guys” are up to. Google monetizes it and returns the favor by data-sharing with the government.

The consumer might have his every need…indeed wish…met, but web-users are now going to find that Google’s “free lunch:” is not only not free, it’s not remotely cheap.

And web users are the ones footing the bill.

Here’s how.

“Google Hummingbird: Where no search has gone before,” Jeremy Hull, iProspect, Wired, October 15, 2013

“Google has updated its search algorithm many times over the past few years, but previous updates were focused on making Google better at gathering information — for example, indexing websites more often and identifying spammy content. Hummingbird is focused on the user. It’s about Google getting better at understanding what searchers really want and providing them with better answers.”

That’s Google’s stated objective, of course. But how about websites?

When you search Google for answers to questions, what website owners want is for you to go to their site to get the information.

This is not only because they might hope to sell you something and thereby earn a living.

It’s also because they hope that by giving you good information not available in the mainstream media,  they might attract you to their site and persuade you on other issues.

By offering free information, web writers hope you will find them reliable, credible, or interesting and become committed readers. That’s why millions of writers and websites, spend inordinate amounts of energy and time finding answers and giving them away to others for free.

Of course, ethics and decency demand that readers who benefit from that information cite the place they found it and give the author credit.

Not Hummingbird.

It harvests information from the net and puts it on Information cards that pop up in answer to searches.

Now, if the information is immediately given to the reader by Google, why will they visit the websites from which Google might have culled the answer?

They won’t.  That means that Google is not only stealing the private data of its users through Gmail, Google Earth, and a bunch of other programs, it’s also stealing from the websites it’s supposed to be helping.

But “Hummingbird” is not just unfriendly to websites offering information to the public, it acts to control what information is presented to you and how.

Hummingbird’s graphic is an easy way for Google to give you what Google (and very likely, the government) want you to know, rather than what you might learn if you delved into your search results yourself.

The new graphic could even give you downright misleading or inaccurate information. Just think about Snopes, the ostensibly myth-busting site that somehow manages to bust myths only in left-liberal ways.

So, Hummingbird is not only using your personal information for Google’s own commercial (and the government’s surveillance) purposes, it’s using information from blogs/websites, without their permission, for its own operations.

That’s two counts of IP theft.

Then, the whole business of trying to determine exactly what you’re thinking when you type certain things into the search function sounds awfully like mind-reading to me. In order to do that kind of mind-reading, all sorts of personal information from your web usage (even more than Google has been collecting so far) has to be collated and compared. Mapped, if you will.

That’s two counts of privacy invasion.

Finally, by manipulating access to the knowledge available on the Internet, under the guise of consumer satisfaction, by giving you pre-packaged answers before it gives you your search results, Google is actually  trying to control your thinking.

That’s one count of mind-control.

Is it any surprise that the new algorithm shares its name with DARPA’s nano flying robot/drone Hummingbird, which beats its wings like a bird?.

DARPA’s Hummingbird is a spy drone:

“The drone, built by AeroVironment with funding from DARPA, is able to fly forwards, backwards, and sideways, as well as rotate clockwise and counterclockwise. Not only does the ‘bot resemble its avian inspiration in size (it’s only slightly larger than a hummingbird, with a 6.5-inch wingspan and a weight of 19 grams), it also looks impressively like a hummingbird in flight.

But that’s not vanity — it’s key to the drone’s use as a spy device, as it can perch near its subject without alerting it.”

Google’s Hummingbird seems no less innocuous and no less insidious.

It’s more evil-doing from the Franken-SearchEngine that routinely spies for the NSA and CIA and systematically  commits Intellectual Property theft.

Read more at Entrepreneur .com

UN study slanders Asian men as rapists

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I need to expand more on the way that “rape” is being used to slander Asian societies as a whole in the Western mainstream media, controlled ultimately by a small group of owners.

The basis for the slander is a UN-led study:

The UN multi-country study on men and violence in Asia and the Pacific.

The study is sponsored by Partners for Prevention—on behalf of UNDP (UN Development Program), UNFPA (UN Population Fund) UN Women, and UNV (UN Volunteers).
and is described as follows:

From 2010 to 2013, over 10,000 men in six countries across Asia and the Pacific were interviewed using the UN Multi-country Study on Men and Violence household survey on men’s perpetration and experiences of violence, as well as men’s other life experiences. The countries included were Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. The study was a collaborative effort involving partners from academia, research institutes, civil society, the United Nations family and governments around the globe

Vietnam is also included, though not mentioned in the paragraph above.

The UN Population Fund’s goal is very clearly defined, behind the rhetoric of “rights.”

It is monitoring population growth and migration, ensuring family-planning through contraception and abortion, and securing female emancipation with a view to ensuring the previously-stated goals.

QUOTE:

The goals of UNFPA – achieving universal access to sexual and reproductive health (including family planning), promoting reproductive rights, reducing maternal mortality and accelerating progress on the ICPD agenda and MDG 5 – are inextricably linked. UNFPA also focuses on improving the lives of youths and women by advocating for human rights and gender equality and by promoting the understanding of population dynamics. Population dynamics, including growth rates, age structure, fertility and mortality and migration have an effect on every aspect of human, social and economic progress. And sexual and reproductive health and women’s empowerment all powerfully affect and are influenced by population trends.

The findings of the UN study were trumpeted uncritically in the major media:

See “Nearly quarter of men in Asia-Pacific admit to committing rape,” Kate Hodal, The Guardian, Sept 9, 2013.

However, a few critical observers found gaping holes in the methodology used:

“One in four men in Asia “admit to committing rape”? It doesn’t add up,” Stuart Brown, The Guardian, Sept 18, 2013.

Brown points out the incredibly shoddy and tendentious reasoning behind the statistic that claims that one in four Asians are rapists.

QUOTE:

“The shocking headline figure that 25% of the men surveyed admit to raping a partner or a stranger appears to offer unequivocal confirmation that Asian women are the victims of a deep-rooted, cultural problem.As with many studies of this type, however, what we’re witnessing is the wide dissemination of one hopelessly misleading statistic, while the rest of the research in the report – the stuff that actually matters – is ignored.”

The study covers Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Sri Lanka, and Papua and New Guinea.

That itself is odd. Why would Korea, India, and Japan be left out?

The second oddity is that  the samples are not even representative nationally.

For instance, for Papua and New Guinea, the sampling is drawn entirely from one place – the island of Bougainville.

The third oddity is that there are only two places where “yes” responses to rape are over 25% and they are both areas with a recent history of violent conflict. A higher incidence of rape would be expected in such areas.

Without those two areas, the proportion of “yes” answers falls to 18%.

Finally, except in the case of Bangladesh, the question signifying admission of rape doesn’t even clearly indicate the use of force, but runs as follows:

“Have you had sexual intercourse with your partner when you knew she didn’t want to, but believed she should agree because she was your wife/partner?”

In the Bangladesh sample, where the question most directly mentions force, the number of “yes” answers is also the lowest.

This suggests that the results of the whole study have been dramatically skewed by the ambiguous structuring of a question that doesn’t even deal with what most people would call rape, but rather with the inherently problematic dynamics of marital relations.

But, even apart from the bogus nature of the questioning itself, there is the sheer ludicrousness of slandering the whole of Asia – some 4 billion plus people – on the basis of a questionnaire circulated to some 10,000 people, replete with elementary methodological flaws.

Indeed, the study looks less like a study and more like the kind of  public relations concoction that has armed the “anti-trafficking agenda” with equally sensational and equally flimsy claims.

See “Women’s Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study is Junk Science,” Village Voice, March 23, 2011.

Like bogus sex trafficking research, the bogus rape research seems to be driven by the need to come up with lurid statistics to draw funding, media attention, and political backing.

And what could be the goal of the study’s political backers, which are departments of the UN?

That too is evident.

The UN has always pursued the goals of the Western elites, under cover of internationalism.

Those goals include the need to corral and control the populous nations of Asia, lest they compete too strongly with those of the West for resources.

See the following:

George Kennan, Head of the US State Dept. Policy Planning Staff, Memo PPS23, Feb 28, 1948:

QUOTE:

In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to “be liked” or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers’ keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and—for the Far East—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

We should recognize that our influence in the Far Eastern area in the coming period is going to be primarily military and economic. We should make a careful study to see what parts of the Pacific and Far Eastern world are absolutely vital to our security, and we should concentrate our policy on seeing to it that those areas remain in hands which we can control or rely on.

Thus, the obvious implication of formulating bogus “rape studies” targeting Asian countries, let alone drawing wildly exaggerated conclusions from them, is the need for more surveillance and control of Asian populations by the international proxies of the Western elites.

Given the results of such surveillance and control in the US, where the prison population is the highest in the world and overwhelmingly black and brown, it is shameful that Asian media and government have not called out the slanderous characterizations of the UN study for what they are –

– Racist propaganda masquerading as social-science.

If the targets of the study had been African Americans, there would be no doubt that the researchers would have immediately been unmasked as latter-day theorists of classic scientific racism.

Anti-Spy Wear: Modest Swim-Suits Fight the Pornocracy

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In an age of universal surveillance and blackmail, involuntary porn, state-mandated voyeurism, mass rape and sodomy of prisoners,  Google-Glass, and citizen-spying, modest swim-wear might be the most astute political statement a woman can make.

It protects her privacy and dignity from snoopers and pornographers, looking for cheap shots, as well as from state operatives and contractors, fattening their files for blackmailing purposes.

I’ve made the connection between surveillance and blackmail many times on this blog and even back in 2004, in essays on virtual crime (used later in Language of Empire).

Alfred McCoy’s recent piece on the subject (cited above) substantiates the accuracy of my analysis.

The making and circulation of pornographic images are powerful tools of the state-corporate complex.

The key role of such images in blackmailing operations that universalize the power of the state is precisely the reason I am less than admiring of theorists who praise the public virtues of blackmail unthinkingly, people like Murray Rothbard and Walter Block.

Check out the Christian blog,  Big-is-Beautiful, for attractive, modern swimwear that is modest….

..that lets a woman be a lady and leaves her physical dignity and privacy intact.

(Here is a list of modest swim-wear made for Jewish ladies; this one is for Muslims).

Ambani, Manmohan: CIA Spying On India Helps Poor

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Aadhar (biometric ID) will help the Indian poor, say Nandan Nilekani (CEO of Infosys), Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google), Mukesh Ambani (CEO of Reliance), Manmohan Singh (PM of India); and George Tenet (CIA spymaster), although social science research and the experience of the US and UK with national identification schemes have overall been negative toward it.

Ambani and Co. all support the introduction of the ID via a company called MongoDB which is connected to the CIA-related firm, In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s venture capital arm):

From MoneyLife.in (March 12, 2013)

“Meanwhile, according to a report from Economic Timesand Navbharat Times, Max Schireson, CEO of MongoDB (formerly called 10gen), a technology company from US which is co-funded by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was in New Delhi two weeks back to enter into a contract with UIDAI.

This company is a Palo Alto and Manhattan-based database software provider in the $30 billion relational database market. Relational databases commenced in the 1970s when computers were moving away from punch cards (that facilitated holocaust in Germany using census data) to terminals. It is taking away customers from Oracle and IBM. This contract has not been disclosed so far. MongoDB will take data from UIDAI to undertake its analysis. UIDAI is tight-lipped about CIA’s role in it.”

10gen is the company behind MongoDB, a popular open-source, document-oriented database. It forms a part of a new generation of NoSQL — Not Only SQL — database products developed as an alternative to conventional relational databases from Oracle, IBM and Microsoft……

According to the report, one of the investors of MongoDB is In-Q-Tel (IQT), a not-for-profit organisation based in Virginia, USA created to bridge the gap between the technology needs of the US Intelligence Community and emerging commercial innovation. It identifies and invests in venture-backed startups developing technologies that provide “ready-soon innovation” (within 36 months) which is vital for the mission of the intelligence community. IQT was launched in 1999. Its core purpose is to keep CIA and other intelligence agencies equipped with the latest in information technology to support intelligence capability. Edward Snowden had revealed that US intelligence agencies are targeting communications in Asian countries. It was founded by Norman Ralph Augustine.

In his book ‘At The Center Of The Storm: My Years at the CIA”, former CIA director George Tenet says, “We (the CIA) decided to use our limited dollars to leverage technology developed elsewhere. In 1999 we chartered … In-Q-Tel. … While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of CIA. CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology … This … collaboration … enabled CIA to take advantage of the technology that Las Vegas uses to identify corrupt card players and apply it to link analysis for terrorists [cf. the parallel data-mining effort by the SOCOM-DIA operation Able Danger], and to adapt the technology that online booksellers use and convert it to scour millions of pages of documents looking for unexpected results.”

In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over $2.2 million, on 15 November 2005. The stocks were a result of Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, the CIA funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth. On 15 August 2005, Washington Post reported that In-Q-Tel was funded with about $37 million a year from the CIA. “In my view the organisation has been far more successful than I dreamed it would be,” said Norman R Augustine, who was recruited in 1998 by Krongard and George J Tenet, who then was director of central intelligence (DCI) to CIA, to help set up In-Q-Tel. Augustine, former chief executive of defense giant Lockheed Martin, is an In-Q-Tel trustee.

Notably, former CIA chief, Tenet, was on the board of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software, which was a US company when UIDAI signed a contract agreement with it. A truncated copy of the contract agreement accessed through RTI is available with the author. This company has now been bought over by Safran group, a French defence company. The subsidiary of this French company in which French government has 30.5% shares, Sagem Morpho has also signed a contract agreement with UIDAI. In August 2011, Safran acquired L-1 Identity Solutions.

In the backdrop of these disclosures, how credible are the poor-centric claims of Mukesh Ambani, Nilekeni and Eric Schmidt who are taking Indian legislators, officials, citizens and the Indian intelligence community for a royal ride. Clearly, aadhaar creates a platform for social control and surveillance technologies to have a field day and undermines nations’ sovereignty, security and citizens’ democratic rights. Nilekeni wrote ‘Imagining India’, McKinsey & Company edited ‘Reimagining India,’ it is evident that their idea of India is contrary to idea of India that emerged from the freedom struggle since 1857 and the constitution of India.”

US And Its Keystone Kops Gestapo?

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Ilana Mercer at BarelyaBlog.com

“Note that TOP SECRET is defined as information which could cause “exceptionally grave damage” to America. Stolen and released here were 3 million documents. HOW SPECIFICALLY did America suffer from this “exceptionally grave damage”??? Did Godzilla stomp over Maine? Was Iowa sucked up by a sinkhole? Did bubonic plague kill everyone in California? Was Duck Dynasty cancelled? Did employment in the US drop from 65% of adults to 58% ? – (yes – but this was related more to wasting trillions on idiotic wars than Snowden’s leaks)?

According to the news, the Pentagon has come out with an assessment of the 3 million “beyond exceptionally grave damage” incidents that have ruined life in America. Of course, it turns out that the “beyond exceptionally grave damage” is also TOP SECRET – yes, America has been destroyed but don’t tell a soul.

Or is the real scandal that trillions of $$$$ have been spent generating classified documents that are mostly worthless toilet paper, while this country remains utterly ignorant of anything that occurs overseas?

[Lila: Slight correction. The “country remains utterly ignorant” is the POINT of the whole thing. That’s not “inept.” That’s super-efficient.]

That’s the way the whole system is supposed to operate, with complete “freedom of expression” guaranteed to produce cacophony, over which no one can distinguish true from false without considerable effort and time that most people cannot afford to expend.

“Trillions are “wasted” only if you care about the serfs who are generating the trillions of real “wealth,” which include people here and all over the world.

By the miracle of unlimited carpet-bombing-sustained-dollar-generation, global casino capitalism, rigged market indices, rigged media, and rigged language  (“free trade,” “human rights” and “democracy”), the cartel which runs the system manages to paper over what is actually a brutal global plantation of managed trade, liberventionism, and fascism, run through a malign network of spy/surveillance mechanisms, proxy wars, police-actions, NGO campaigns, and propaganda, operating globally, but headquartered in Israel, the US, and the UK, with satrapies all over.

“That the US winds up funding and building up both sides in wars and pseudo-wars in third-world countries by people who generally hate our guts?

Lila: They generally “hate our guts” because of things done by the US Govt, which are concealed or distorted by its propaganda arm – academia, think-tanks, and the media (left and right, print, online, major, and alternative, including conspiracy sites). All are infiltrated, controlled, and distorted, not only by propaganda but also by commercial imperatives.

That we have politicians who cannot find Niger on a map bloviating about the “evil of Snowden”? That the archived trillion-trillion bytes of searchable database on Americans is far more likely to be abused by paranoid politicians like Nixon, Clinton, Obama, and Christie against domestic political opponents than to sort out minutia between illiterate Taliban goat-herders in Afghanistan?

At best, after Abdul blows up his backpack, we may find that he had earlier been “talking Jihad” with Ishmael and we subsequently kill Ishmael and 50 others at a wedding party proudly announcing that we have killed “Ishmael the potential terrorist,” while forgetting the relatives of the other 50 who are new terrorist recruits.

What America has made is an NSA “Keystone-Kops-Gestapo” that is as inept as it is insidious – sucking up a whirlwind of mostly useless data and the 4th Amendment in the process. While the NSA archives our tweeting and our twerking, let us not forget Benjamin Franklin’s advice: “those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither”. The “exceptionally grave damage” is to our freedoms!

For syndication rights to http://BarelyABlog.com or http://IlanaMercer.com, contact ilana@ilanamercer.com. Read more @ http://barelyablog.com/#ixzz2qlmEsmhg
Comment:
I am in general agreement with this, except for the reference to Keystone Kops.
The Keystone Kops routine is only at the level of what the politicians and public figures do.

Behind the scenes, the spy agencies, the puppet-masters behind them (not always in control but certainly in charge) pursue, quite ruthlessly and well, an agenda whose visible outlines are by now apparent even to ordinary people.