Have fun with the USA police state
 

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05/11/nsa.phonerecords.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional Democrats demanded answers from the Bush administration Thursday about a report that the government secretly collected records of ordinary Americans' phone calls to build a database of every call made within the country.
"It is our government, it's not one party's government. It's America's government. Those entrusted with great power have a duty to answer to Americans what they are doing," said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.


so not only are they illegally wiretapping american citizen's phone calls to overseas, they are keeping a running tally on ALL the US citizens phone records. yeah, big brother got here and noone noticed. have fun. this next election will tell us whether we still live in a representative democracy or whether the assholes entrenched in power will succed in forcing us into a totalitarian police state. all it would take, and you know they ahve thougt of this, is to get another brainwahsed arab guy to try and blow up the washington monument andthen they can declare a police state and entrench dubya bush as presidente for life "until the national calamity is overcome" meaning NEVER

Hitler did the exact same thing. I am not sayng it will happen, but it has started already and if it progresses pay attention and get the fuck out the country when it does, before it is too late.

if you do not believe me check out this section of the previously mentioned article

Inquiry into eavesdropping killed

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the NSA refused to grant its lawyers the necessary security clearance. (Full story)
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-New York, on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."
Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules. He declined to comment when asked if the end of the inquiry meant the agency believed its lawyers had handled the wiretapping matter ethically.

Well, I'm glad that doesn't happen in my country (ha). Because the British Police haven't been carrying firearms in one-in-five cars since the 70's. And so on...

Yeah that's America:fuckyou:

I dont care if they tap the phone lines. What are they going to do? If they didnt do it secretly then these suposed terrorists would know about it.

they are not just tapping the phone lines, they are keeping a database of every single call made by every single american. long live fascism. lobg live freedom of speech and privacy and freedom from illegal search and seizure.

ahmen to that

Come on Sheriff, that isn't what our country was founded under. You know that (I hope).

terrorists 1 usa 0

they win ....we gave up our freedom...

"Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all...It was pitiful...I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him 'Mr. President,' and then I felt ashamed." -on Bush's 2004 debate performance
-HST

xclusive! The FBI Deputizes Business


By Matthew Rothschild, February 7, 2008


http://www.progressive.org/files/story/infragard.jpg


Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law.
InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.
InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.
“Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.
InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.
“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.
“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”
In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that “350 of our nation’s Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.”
To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation.
FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. At that time, the group had less than half as many members as it does today. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard,” he said. “From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”
He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”
In an interview with InfraGard after the conference, which is featured prominently on the InfraGard members’ website, Mueller says: “It’s a great program.”
The ACLU is not so sanguine.
“There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations—some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI,” the ACLU warned in its August 2004 report The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society.
InfraGard is not readily accessible to the general public. Its communications with the FBI and Homeland Security are beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act under the “trade secrets” exemption, its website says. And any conversation with the public or the media is supposed to be carefully rehearsed.
“The interests of InfraGard must be protected whenever presented to non-InfraGard members,” the website states. “During interviews with members of the press, controlling the image of InfraGard being presented can be difficult. Proper preparation for the interview will minimize the risk of embarrassment. . . . The InfraGard leadership and the local FBI representative should review the submitted questions, agree on the predilection of the answers, and identify the appropriate interviewee. . . . Tailor answers to the expected audience. . . . Questions concerning sensitive information should be avoided.”
One of the advantages of InfraGard, according to its leading members, is that the FBI gives them a heads-up on a secure portal about any threatening information related to infrastructure disruption or terrorism.
The InfraGard website advertises this. In its list of benefits of joining InfraGard, it states: “Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more.”
InfraGard members receive “almost daily updates” on threats “emanating from both domestic sources and overseas,” Hershman says.
“We get very easy access to secure information that only goes to InfraGard members,” Schneck says. “People are happy to be in the know.”
On November 1, 2001, the FBI had information about a potential threat to the bridges of California. The alert went out to the InfraGard membership. Enron was notified, and so, too, was Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley. He notified his brother Gray, the governor of California.
“He said his brother talked to him before the FBI,” recalls Steve Maviglio, who was Davis’s press secretary at the time. “And the governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, ‘I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn’t the public know?’ ”
Maviglio still sounds perturbed about this: “You’d think an elected official would be the first to know, not the last.”
In return for being in the know, InfraGard members cooperate with the FBI and Homeland Security. “InfraGard members have contributed to about 100 FBI cases,” Schneck says. “What InfraGard brings you is reach into the regional and local communities. We are a 22,000-member vetted body of subject-matter experts that reaches across seventeen matrixes. All the different stovepipes can connect with InfraGard.”
Schneck is proud of the relationships the InfraGard Members Alliance has built with the FBI. “If you had to call 1-800-FBI, you probably wouldn’t bother,” she says. “But if you knew Joe from a local meeting you had with him over a donut, you might call them. Either to give or to get. We want everyone to have a little black book.”
This black book may come in handy in times of an emergency. “On the back of each membership card,” Schneck says, “we have all the numbers you’d need: for Homeland Security, for the FBI, for the cyber center. And by calling up as an InfraGard member, you will be listened to.” She also says that members would have an easier time obtaining a “special telecommunications card that will enable your call to go through when others will not.”
This special status concerns the ACLU.
“The FBI should not be creating a privileged class of Americans who get special treatment,” says Jay Stanley, public education director of the ACLU’s technology and liberty program. “There’s no ‘business class’ in law enforcement. If there’s information the FBI can share with 22,000 corporate bigwigs, why don’t they just share it with the public? That’s who their real ‘special relationship’ is supposed to be with. Secrecy is not a party favor to be given out to friends. . . . This bears a disturbing resemblance to the FBI’s handing out ‘goodies’ to corporations in return for folding them into its domestic surveillance machinery.”
“We were assured that if we were forced to kill someone to protect our infrastructure, there would be no repercussions,” the whistleblower says. “It gave me goose bumps. It chilled me to the bone.”

from the Progressive.com

I usually say bomb so I can trigger the wiretapping machine. I also say Bin Laden, and Bush.

the only way to combat this (...well aside from having some sort of democratic process by which the people have a say in what the government does... for real, and not in publicrelationsland.) is to exponentially increase the number of phone calls you make. conduct ALL of your human interaction on the phone. i don't care if the person is sitting next to you at a bar. use your cell phone. make conference calls, you can include the people on the dance floor in the conversation. when you do your grocery shopping, ask the cashier for her cell number and conduct the transaction over the phone. buy your neighborhood bum a super cheap phone and insist that next time he sees you come out of the gas station he call you to ask for change. in your free time, spam 1-800 numbers for customer service on products you do not own.

from a computing standpoint as well as legal standpoint, the strategy is simply. create such a massive amount of data for the feds to process that by the time they dig up some dirt on you, the statue of limitations on whatever they claim you did will have expired. unless you are actually planning on a career in suicide bombing, this can only work to your advantage. it's a variation on the classic crytpoanalysis trade off. the more secure your encryption, the longer it will be until some one breaks it (it will always eventually be broken.) in this scheme, the higher the volume of your cell phone traffic, the longer it will be (somewhat) secure.

...of course it couldn't hurt to put actual encryption on all of your phone calls while yr at it, or at least the ones it matters (and some of the ones it doesn't - just to throw the feds off.)

http://www.pgpi.org/products/pgpfone/



[edit: actually, since this is to some extent a disinformation scheme, you should use strong digital encryption only for things it doesn't matter for, like ordering pizza or chinese takeout. if you were going to (hypthetically) buy weed, you would use old school encryption, which you should be doing anyway:

"Hi, I'm called about an ad I saw in the paper for a landscaping job." (do you have any weed?)

"Yeah, what time can you come in for an interview?" (sure, how much do you want?)

"8 o'clock tomorrow works for me." (an eigth oz. ...or 3:30 = 3.5 g... whatever you worked out before hand.)]

Trouble Every Day

We at Echelon Sub_Node7 thank you for yr contribution toward our continued job security.

Please, keep talking.

i heard he is the one that actually runs this country. i like his hat.

I wish our president was more like this guy:

I totally agree.

ever call 911 and say, "boooooooop. this is a test of the 911 emergency response system. had this been an actual emergency, i would be telling you where i was and what had happened. boop. boop. boop. feeedbaack squueeeeeeeeaaaaaaaal!!!!!"

there are so many things wrong with that statement I dont even know where to begin. you only say this because it is so seemingly insignificant, but what about in the future when they saturate the streets with military and take over the people's right to simply exist? Have you never seen the reactions of the US military to protest movements in the 1960s? It is evidence of the self-destructive capabilities of the United States government against its own people.

under democracy a country gets the government it deserves!

I see half-ripped off "This Phone Is Tapped" stickers everywhere.

They're trying to silence the right to sticker speech.

To quote Edward R. Murrow quoting Shakespeare, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

Things like this have been going on for years.

old news, my friend

Caught on tape: More deputies accused of brutally beating inmate

 

By: Mike Deeson
Tampa, Florida- Former teacher Paul King says he used to be one of those people who said lock 'em up throw away the key.
However King has changed his mind since being arrested on public intoxication last July. A video shows deputies pushed him against a glass wall as he was being frisked, threw him to the ground for no apparent reason, held his neck back more than 2 minutes as he was being put into a restraint chair, put a hood over his face and then appeared to try to hide the action from cameras by moving paperwork to cover his head.
King says it's something like out of Guantanamo.
King says when he was out of camera view, two deputies took him out of the restraining chair and says they both started kneeing him up against a bench or a wall, as he was pleading please, please, please.
But it didn't stop there. King says they made him say you're a f***ing p***y. And he says they were hurting him so he said “ I'm a f***ing p****y and the deputies all laughed.
Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum has ordered an inquiry into all the allegations, however a spokesman for the McCollum says it is too early to determine whether these are isolated incidents or there is a pattern of abuse occurring.
But despite the fact the attorney general and the sheriff's office each launched separate investigations, some have said they fear this is an attempt to sweep things under the rug rather than to find the truth.
Attorney John Trevena, who represents some of the people claiming abuse, met with McCollum's office on Thursday and says he believes there is a need for federal oversite in this. Trevena says he hopes he is wrong but he is losing confidence in the state's ability to handle this.
And those who claim they have been abused in the jail are losing confidence in the system. King says when he was going through this he thought it was something like the Orwell novel, "1984." King says they can do whatever they want.
And critics say right now no one is stopping them.



Mike Deeson,Tampa Bay's 10 News

when the president of the united states condones torture, congress looks the other way, and giuliani-time gets to campaign for the presidency, it's no wonder the minions of the state feel they have a green light to do this type of thing as well.

i wonder if there are any veterans of abu ghraib or guantánamo among those cops

2 + 2 = 5

inter government have been spying on people since the day the technology existed. There are people with enough money/powa to get whatever they want. it happens.

that's it. i'm out of here.

let's kill the california girls first cantank

Good news! House Democrats stood up to President Bush and defended our Constitution last week.

Here's what happened: As a national security bill moved through Congress, Bush said Democrats would be helping the terrorists if the bill didn't include retroactive immunity for lawbreaking phone companies. Such immunity would mean a "get out of jail free" card for companies that helped Bush illegally spy on the calls and emails of innocent Americans—halting lawsuits currently being heard in court.

These lawsuits may be the only way Americans ever find out how far Bush went in breaking the law. Instead of caving in, House Democrats pushed back hard. Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared, "The president is wrong, and he knows it." And on Friday, House Democrats passed the security bill without immunity for lawbreakers and with new checks and balances on the Bush administration!

MoveOn members and other progressives helped make this victory happen. Tens of thousands of phone calls and emails—and hundreds of thousands of petition signatures—demanded that Democrats stand on principle. Over the course of several months, we kept the pressure on.

The fight's not over. All eyes now turn to the Senate. But when progressives win important fights—and when Democratic elected leaders show backbone after an outpouring of public sentiment—it's important to take a step back and celebrate. Together, our activism made a big difference!

Below are two articles describing our victory in the House last week. One ran this weekend in the New York Times. The other is by former prosecutor Glenn Greenwald, blogging about the victory at Salon.


Thanks for all you do. –Nita, Adam G., Justin, Tanya, Anna, and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team
Monday, March 17th, 2008
P.S. You can see how your representative voted here. A "Yea" vote was for the good bill and against immunity for lawbreakers:

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll145.xml EXCERPTS

New York Times: "House Rejects Eavesdropping Immunity" (March 14, 2008)

WASHINGTON—After its first secret session in a quarter-century, the House on Friday rejected retroactive immunity for the phone companies that took part in the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program after the Sept. 11 attacks, and it voted to place greater restrictions on the government's wiretapping powers.
The decision, by a largely party-line vote of 213 to 197, is one of the few times when Democrats have been willing to buck up against the White House on a national security issue.

...The House bill approved Friday includes three key elements: it would refuse retroactive immunity to the phone companies, providing special authority instead for the courts to decide the liability issue; it would add additional judicial restrictions on the government's wiretapping powers while plugging certain loopholes in foreign coverage; and it would create a Congressional commission to investigate the N.S.A. program.
...House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was sharply critical of the president's assessment that the legislation would not make America safer. "The president is wrong, and he knows it," she said on Thursday.

Read the full story here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/washington/14cnd-fisa.html
Salon's Glenn Greenwald: "House Democrats reject telecom amnesty, warrantless surveillance" (March 14, 2008)
As impressive as the House vote itself was, more impressive still was the floor debate which preceded it. I can't recall ever watching a debate on the floor of either House of Congress that I found even remotely impressive—until today. One Democrat after the next—of all stripes—delivered impassioned, defiant speeches in defense of the rule of law, oversight on presidential eavesdropping, and safeguards on government spying. They swatted away the GOP's fear-mongering claims with the dismissive contempt such tactics deserve, rejecting the principle that has predominated political debate in this country since 9/11: that the threat of the Terrorists means we must live under the rule of an omnipotent President and a dismantled constitutional framework.
...It's hard not to believe that there's at least some significant sea change reflected by this. They have seen that they can defy the President even on matters of Terrorism, and the sky doesn't fall in on them. Quite the opposite: an outspoken opponent of telecom amnesty, warrantless eavesdropping and the Iraq War was just elected to the House from Denny Hastert's bright red district, and before that, Donna Edwards ousted long-time incumbent Al Wynn by accusing him of being excessively complicit with the Bush agenda.
Virtually every one I know who has expended lots of efforts and energy on these FISA and telecom issues has assumed from the start—for reasons that are all too well-known—that we would lose. And we still might. But it's hard to deny that the behavior we're seeing from House Democrats is substantially improved, quite commendably so, as compared to the last year and even before that. It's very rare when there are meaningful victories and I think it's important to acknowledge when they happen.
Read the full story here:
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3498&id=12324-7673309-XMwBUq&t=61




This is from an email I got from Move On who are kind annoying at times...I think a friend from college signed me up for these emails a few years ago.

so I see you have discovered my route, may I interest you in some Rastafari propaganda?

http://groups.msn.com/twelvetribesliveup
http://www.nyahbinghi.org/
http://www.houseofbobo.com/

or more significantly, some Garveyite propaganda?

http://www.marcusgarvey.com/wmview.php?ArtID=401

and to seal the deal, here is some Imperial Ethiopian information to go the opposite direction of Lenin and become a monarchist rather then an anarchist..

http://www.imperialethiopia.org/selassie.htm
http://www.ethiopianorthodox.org

http://www.eotc.faithweb.com/

ps-- krastian-- great news!

ive been keeping track of that on the wapo--

Not that it is new news or anything, but W has a lot of nerve to do all the shit that he does.

I see you have taken serious consideration to the Rastafari anti-American platform as well?